15 October 2015, 06:05

After today’s earlier posting looking at creating Live Photos from movie clips, I thought I’d have a try making some Live Photo Watch faces that you can download and use. They’re a little rough and ready, but they’re listed for download below. They should also be usable on the iPhone 6S too, as lock screen wallpapers, although I focussed solely on creating Watch-oriented images.

The images/movies all come from Beachfront B-Roll and are public domain items from Archive.org. To create the Live Photos I played the movie clips in QuickTime Player, and then used QuickTime’s own screen recording tool (File > New Screen Recording) to record the playback window and thereby create snippets – often speeding up the original footage to make for a more fluid animation akin to Apple’s own live watch faces.

To use these on your Watch, you’ll need to do the following:

Ensure your Watch’s Photos app is set to show your most recent photos, rather than your favourites; this can be done in the Watch’s own Settings app, or in the Watch app on your iPhone. Ensure iCloud Photo syncing is enabled across your devices – this can be done by selecting the option after clicking the iCloud entry in System Preferences app on the Mac, or Settings on the iPhone. Download any of the zips below, then drag BOTH files from the zip (a JPG and a MOV file) on top of the Photos app. This will add them to your Camera Roll as a single Live Photo. Wait a few moments while your iPhone and Watch sync with your Mac across iCloud. On your Watch, open the Photos app, select the new Live Photo image, and force touch so that the option of creating a new Watch face comes up. Select to do so. Open the Watch app to test your new Live Photo Watch face (hint: put your Watch quickly to sleep by putting your hand over its face, then wake in the usual way by raising your arm). To zoom in or out of the image, or centre it better, force touch it and tap Customize and then roll the digital crown up or down, and drag the image around to suit your needs. Force tap again when you’ve finished.

Here are the files. Click to download and feel free to share on your own site. Also, let me know if you create any yourself that you want to offer for download and I’ll link to them here: