Motion Photo to Video

Why I built this

My phone has had motion photos switched on for years. I never touched the setting, so every picture I take secretly records a couple of seconds of video around the moment I press the shutter. On the phone that's lovely. You press and hold, the kid blows out the candles, the dog sneezes. Copy the same picture to a laptop and the magic is gone. Windows shows a still. My Mac shows a still. Send it to my mum and she gets a still.

The video is still in the file, though. It's tucked onto the end of the JPG where normal image viewers never look. When I went looking for a way to pull it out, I found Python scripts, a Rust crate, an exiftool one-liner and a single website that only understood Pixel files and wanted me to upload them. Uploading private family videos to a random server just to cut a file in two felt silly. So this page does the cutting inside your browser. Nothing leaves your computer.

How to use it

Clips straight off a phone can still be bigger than a chat app allows. If one won't send, the video compressor can shrink it.

1. Get the original photo files onto your computer. A USB cable, Google Drive or Samsung Cloud download, or Quick Share all work. Messaging apps usually don't (more on that below).
2. Drop one photo or a whole batch into the box above. JPG and HEIC are both fine.
3. Click Extract Video. Each photo that holds a clip gets a little player so you can check it before saving.
4. Download the MP4, the still JPG, or everything at once as a ZIP.

That's it. A batch of fifty photos takes a few seconds, because there's no upload and no re-encoding. The tool finds where the video starts and where it ends, then copies those bytes out exactly as the phone recorded them.

What a motion photo really is

A motion photo is one file pretending to be two. The front is an ordinary JPEG, which is why every image viewer happily opens it. Glued on behind the picture is a short MP4 clip, usually about three seconds long. The phone's gallery knows to look past the end of the image and play the clip. Almost nothing else does.

Samsung and Google glue the clip on in slightly different ways. Google's format (used by Pixel phones and quite a few other Android brands) writes the clip straight after the image and notes its position in the photo's metadata. Older Pixel files are named MVIMG_something.jpg, newer ones end in .MP.jpg. Samsung puts a small text marker before the video and a block of its own data after it. That trailing block is what trips up a lot of DIY scripts: they assume the video runs to the end of the file and end up with an MP4 that has junk on the end.

This tool doesn't trust either layout blindly. It walks through the MP4 structure box by box, checks that the clip has the parts a real video needs, and stops exactly where the video stops. That's why the same button works for Samsung, Pixel, Top Shot and the HEIC versions of both.

A few real situations

Once the clip is out, the MP4 to GIF converter turns it into a looping GIF you can paste almost anywhere.

• The birthday candles. You took one photo at the right moment and the clip has the whole blow-out, the cheer and the smoke. Pull the MP4 out and it's a proper little video you can put in the family group chat.
• Moving off Samsung. Switching to an iPhone or a different Android brand means your old motion photos turn into flat pictures on the new phone. Run the whole camera folder through here first and keep the clips as normal videos.
• Photo books and slideshows. Video editors want MP4, not a JPG with a hidden tail. Extract the clips and drop them into your slideshow app like any other video.
• The shot you missed. Someone blinked in the photo, but the clip caught a frame half a second earlier where everyone's eyes are open. Get the MP4 out, pause on that frame and screenshot it.
• Making a GIF. A three-second loop of a cat falling off the sofa is basically a GIF already.

Why your video might be missing

If the tool says there's no video inside, the clip really isn't in that file. The usual reasons:

• Motion photo was switched off when you took the picture.
• You received the photo through WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram (as a photo, not a file), Instagram or email from a phone app. These recompress images and throw the clip away.
• The photo was edited and saved as a new picture. Most editors write a fresh JPG with only the still in it.
• It's an iPhone Live Photo. Apple keeps the picture and the video as two separate files, so there's nothing to extract. Export the Live Photo from the Photos app and you'll get the .MOV directly.

Phones also tend to delete the clip if it's mostly blur or nothing moved. A tiny file size is a giveaway: a motion photo is normally several megabytes bigger than the same picture without motion.

What it won't do

Ended up with an HEIC still that your laptop won't open? Run it through the HEIC to JPG converter.

It doesn't re-encode the video, so it can't make the clip longer, sharper or smaller. You get exactly what the phone recorded, which is usually a short clip at a lower resolution than the photo. Some newer phones record the clip in HEVC (H.265). Those files download fine and play on phones, Macs and most Windows PCs, but the preview player here may stay blank in a browser that lacks an HEVC decoder. The downloaded file is still correct.

It also doesn't put the clip back into a photo, and it won't fix a file that a messaging app already stripped. Once the clip is gone, it's gone.

Privacy

The files are read with your browser's own file API and cut apart in memory. There's no upload step and no server copy. You can load the page, switch off Wi-Fi and it'll keep working. Family videos are about as personal as files get, and they should stay on your machine.