LiveMux

Create Motion Photo v2/v3 from HEIC or JPG files paired with videos. Output files are compatible with Google Photos and Samsung Gallery as motion/live photos.

This is a Rust rewrite of PetrVys/MotionPhoto2, providing both a CLI tool (livemux) and a desktop GUI app built with Tauri.

Key improvements over the original Python version:

• Native performance with Rust
• Cross-platform desktop GUI (Tauri v2)
• Automatic MOV→MP4 remux for iPhone Live Photos (via FFmpeg)
• Apple Live Photo metadata cleanup for better Google Photos compatibility

For iPhone Live Photos, the presentation timestamp is migrated so the photo starts from the same keyframe.

Requirements

• ExifTool — required
• FFmpeg — optional, needed to remux iPhone MOV videos to MP4 for Google Photos compatibility

Installation

From Release

Download the release for your platform from the Releases page.

Building from Source

# CLI only
cargo build --release -p livemux-cli

# GUI app (requires Node.js + pnpm)
cd ui && pnpm install && cd ..
cargo tauri build

Usage

GUI

Run the app — it provides a graphical interface with two modes:

• Single Mux: Select an image and video pair to create a motion photo
• Batch Directory: Process an entire directory of image-video pairs

CLI

Single file

livemux mux --image IMG_1234.HEIC --video IMG_1234.MOV

Directory mode

livemux dir --directory /your/directory

With EXIF metadata matching (useful for Google Takeout or iCloud exports where filenames may not match):

livemux dir --directory /your/directory --exif-match

Options

Flag	Description
--overwrite	Replace the original image file
--delete-video	Remove source video after muxing
--keep-temp	Keep intermediate XMP sidecar files
--no-xmp	Skip XMP metadata embedding (faster, less compatible)
--recursive	Process subdirectories recursively
--exif-match	Match image-video pairs by EXIF metadata
--incremental	Skip files that already contain motion photo data
--copy-unmuxed	Copy unmatched images to output directory
-v, --verbose	Enable debug logging

Limitations

HDR in Google Photos works only for HEIC photos with HDR stored in ISO/CD 21496-1 format. Effectively, HEIC photos must be shot on iPhone 15+ with iOS 18+ to be recognized as HDR by Google Photos.

Credits

This project is a Rust rewrite based on the original MotionPhoto2 by Petr Vyskocil, licensed under MIT.

Thanks to the original contributors: @Tkd-Alex, @NightMean, @sahilph, @tribut, @4Urban, @IamRysing.

References

• Google Motion Photo Format
• Samsung trailer tags documentation

License

MIT