TL;DR Motion Photos combine a still picture with a short video clip.
Currently when uploading a Motion Photo to Google Maps, it only works as a still pic.
The app appears to be working on support for letting users choose to upload Motion Photos as videos.
Motion Photos may be one of the coolest camera options available to us that we just don’t pay nearly enough attention to, able to fuse short video clips with our still photos in order to better preserve the whole vibe of a moment. They’re great for when you’re taking a nostalgic dive through your old gallery, but that weird photo/video duality also means that apps don’t always know quite what to do with them. Today, thankfully, we’re checking out one way that situation may soon be getting better.
Maps is easily one of Google’s richest Android apps, packed with all sorts of different data types — and that includes media. When you tap on a place in Maps you’re able to quickly get a sense for what it’s like with the help of all the pics and videos that visitors have uploaded.
So far, though, Maps hasn’t had any real explicit support for Motion Photos, and when you upload one the app just sees it as a still picture.
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Looking through the 25.35.00.798803015 beta release of Google Maps, however, we’ve spotted what appears to be early work towards changing that, and fleshing out the app’s compatibility with Motion Photos.
Right now none of this is yet active, and while we haven’t been able to try out the functionality for ourselves, these text strings paint a rather vivid picture of what we’re likely to expect:
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