Unwanted image formats on multiple devices

Question

Level 1

29 points

Unwanted image formats on multiple devices

What is "Live Photo"? It seems to create a whole stream of slightly different exposures which simply take up space and appear to be pointless. If taken on an iPad (A16) and transferred to an iMac some are ".mov" and some are ".jpg". This causes confusion as the images are sometimes the same.

How do I sort out this mess? Can I remove the "Live Photo" version on the iPad to create a proper jpg version acceptable by any normal device (such as a commercial photo print shop).

Whilst on the subject of image formats I do not want to use the ".heic" format and need to convert a whole set of them back to ".jpg" before transferring them to another device. They currently fail on some devices.

The reason for this request is that this family has a number of devices manufactured by various suppliers including Apple (majority) and of various age which include at the last count iMac, MacBook Pro, iPad, several android phones and at least 3 scanners. We need consistancy.

iMac 27″, macOS 10.13

Posted on Dec 18, 2025 3:39 AM

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Answer 1

Yer_Man

Level 10

165,918 points

Dec 18, 2025 5:43 AM in response to DavJam

Turn off both features.

Take and edit Live Photos - Apple Support

Instructions for turning off the feature is at the bottom of the page.

And HEIC:

https://havecamerawilltravel.com/iphone-disable-heic/

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Answer 2

Dec 18, 2025 7:08 AM in response to DavJam

A "Live Photo" is a picture with a short movie around it. It's not different exposures; it's a movie to add "life" to a picture. It's pretty cute, really, for pictures of your kids or something like that. Unlike video, the images are in high resolution. "Live Photo" is clearly inspired by the Harry Potter books and movies, where the same effect is seen in newspaper photos and framed pictures. "Live Photo" is an Apple Photos thing, so when a Live Photo is exported out of the Photos system, it ceases being "Live," and it becomes a single image with a movie of the same name. The image is just the regular jpg picture file. There's no reason to keep the movie if you don't like it.

The crazy thing is that people will send me a "Live Photo" of a Landscape or, worse, a shot of a book page or maybe some equations on a page-- things that are are not "live" and for which the movement is only a huge distraction. How can they not tell that this is so off-putting? They should just turn off the "Live Photo" mode for stuff like that!

In iOS26, to get to the "Live Photo" button, you push the "More" button at the top:

Then you get a menu that includes the "Live" button.

You can see that I have turned mine off.

To keep the camera from automatically turning it back on, you can go to the Settings>Camera>Preserve Settings and turn ON Preserve Live Photo. This keeps the setting from changing once you set it, either on or off.

HEIC is a more modern, more efficient way to store pictures, but older systems sometimes haven't figured it out. On a Mac you can use a right-click on a bunch of pictures to bring up Quick Actions and change their formats all at once. Oh, I see that your signature says that you are in High Sierra, and I'm not sure that Quick Actions are available in the OS.

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