Pixel Motion Photos deserve better: why Google still hasn’t nailed living memories

There is a tiny bit of magic in a good motion photo. It’s that half-second of movement before and after the shutter: the breath before the smile, the kid tripping over the dog, the wind rustling through the trees, the sound of someone laughing just off-camera. Those little fragments of motion and audio turn a simple still into a memory you can step back into, not just an image you scroll past.

Smartphones have been flirting with this idea for more than a decade. We’ve had different names for it – Zoes, Animated Photos, Live Photos, Motion Photos – but the promise has always been the same: keep the simplicity of a picture and add just enough movement to make it feel alive. The frustrating part is that, in 2025, Google’s Pixel line, otherwise famous for camera excellence, is still stumbling on what should be one of the most emotional camera features.

What motion photos are supposed to be

A motion photo sits somewhere between a still shot and a video clip. Tap the shutter once, and your phone silently records a short moment around that press. Done right, it’s effortless: you get a normal photo for sharing, editing, and backing up, plus a bit of motion when you long-press or swipe through your gallery. No fiddling with modes, no separate video files, no extra work.

That, at least, is the theory. In practice, people are split. Some users adore this kind of feature and now feel weird when a phone doesn’t have it. Others dismiss it as a gimmick that eats storage, complicates sharing, and relies on semi-proprietary formats that don’t always play nicely outside the phone’s own ecosystem. If all you want is clean, small JPEGs to upload anywhere, an animated image you can’t easily post or that doubles the file size really can feel like pointless baggage.

But for those who value it, motion photos are the modern equivalent of home video snippets: tiny, frictionless archives of everyday life. And that is exactly why Google’s current implementation on Pixel is so disappointing – because the idea is great, but the execution keeps getting in the way of the emotion.

Before Live Photos: the early Android experiments

Long before Apple turned the concept into Live Photos, Android manufacturers were already playing with the idea. Back in early 2013, HTC launched the iconic HTC One, a phone remembered for its aluminum body, its ambitious UltraPixel camera, and a curious feature called “Zoe.”

Zoe was essentially a primitive live photo: hold the shutter, and the phone captured a burst of frames with motion and sound. On paper, it was ahead of its time. In reality, the execution was messy. You had to use a special camera mode; every press created a cluster of items in the gallery; and storage exploded with all those mini-clip variations. Even the name was confusing – most people had no idea what a “Zoe” was supposed to mean. It was clever, but it never became part of how people naturally used the camera.

Samsung had its own take soon after. Buried in the Galaxy Note 3’s maze of camera features was something called “Animated Photo.” The concept was slightly different: you shot a brief clip and then manually selected which parts of the frame should move and which should freeze, creating your own cinemagraph-style effect. It was fun in theory, but again, it felt like work. Every shot turned into a mini editing session. Instead of capturing a moment and moving on, you were stuck finessing a novelty GIF on the spot.

Those early attempts proved one thing: the core idea was powerful, but if you made it even a little complicated, people simply wouldn’t use it.

Apple Live Photos: when everything clicked

The breakthrough moment arrived in 2015 with the iPhone 6s and a feature Apple branded as “Live Photos.” The concept was familiar, but Apple nailed the details in a way that made it stick.

With Live Photos enabled, each shot captured roughly 1.5 seconds of video before and after the shutter. The key difference was how invisible it felt. You pressed the shutter exactly as you always had; the camera stayed in the same mode; your gallery stayed organized. Long-press a photo in the Photos app, and it gently animates with sound. No hunting for modes, no cluttered folders.

Apple also integrated it everywhere. Live Photos worked as lock screen wallpapers, could be scrubbed through frame by frame, backed up to iCloud, shared via AirDrop, and selectively exported as stills, videos, or animations. The shutter sound was placed right in the center of the captured segment so the rhythm of the moment felt natural, not jerky or out of sync. It wasn’t just a camera trick; it was an ecosystem feature.

For many iPhone users, Live Photos quietly became the default way they capture their lives. Open an old Live Photo of a birthday party, a vacation, or a random walk with the dog, and those few seconds of motion often mean more than any 4K video you never rewatch.

Google Pixel Motion Photos: the glitch in the memory

On paper, Google should be able to compete easily here. Pixel phones are renowned for their computational photography: HDR+, Night Sight, Portrait mode, Photo Unblur – this is the brand that built its reputation on making images smarter with software. Yet when you actually play back Motion Photos on many recent Pixels, the experience is often… unsettling.

Instead of a gentle little slice of time, you can get something that looks distorted and artificial, like an experimental filter gone wrong. Motion can loop in a strange way, people’s faces stretch and bend, backgrounds wobble, and exposure appears to jump between frames. Instead of enhancing the emotion, the animation undercuts it. It’s hard to feel nostalgic about a moment when everyone in the clip looks half-melted.

The most common Pixel Motion Photo problems

The issues show up again and again:

• Face stretching: Heads, eyes, mouths and cheeks seem to warp from frame to frame, as if some invisible force is pulling on them.
• Background wobble: Straight lines bend, walls flex, and objects in the distance shimmer, especially when the phone or subject is moving.
• Sudden flickers: Exposure and color shift noticeably mid-clip, producing a distracting flicker instead of a smooth transition.
• Weird looping: The way the motion repeats can feel jittery or unnatural, like a low-quality GIF rather than a fluid memory.

These are not minor quirks you only notice if you freeze-frame individual moments. They impact the basic emotional point of a motion photo. If you long-press on a picture of your kid and the result looks like a glitchy deepfake, you’re not going to keep using the feature.

When smart processing becomes too clever

Why does this happen? The short explanation is that Pixel’s camera pipeline is heavily optimized for a single perfect still frame. The phone collects multiple frames, aligns them, merges them, and applies a long list of algorithms to squeeze out the cleanest possible photo. That works brilliantly when the goal is one image. When those same processed frames are stitched into a short motion segment, every tiny misalignment or aggressive correction becomes visible.

Face-stretching, for example, is often the result of motion compensation and frame interpolation trying to reconcile movement between shots. Background wobble hints at stabilization and alignment systems struggling with parallax changes. Flicker can come from the way different frames are exposed and merged. In other words, the very computational tricks that make still Pixel photos look amazing can also make Motion Photos feel eerie.

Do Android users even want this?

This raises a fair question that many Android users quietly ask: is the feature worth the trouble at all? A portion of the audience simply turns Motion Photos off. For them, it was a gimmick ten years ago and remains a gimmick now. Their arguments are simple and not entirely wrong:

• Motion photos take more space, and many people already struggle with full storage.
• The files can rely on proprietary or semi-proprietary formats, so playing them outside the phone isn’t always straightforward.
• Most websites and apps still expect a plain static image upload; a moving image often has to be converted manually to a video or GIF anyway.

If your phone is your main camera, backup device, and sharing tool, you might absolutely prefer clean stills, predictable file sizes, and hassle-free uploads. From that perspective, Motion Photos can feel like a half-baked extra that adds more complexity than joy.

But there is also a big group of users – especially parents, pet owners, and travelers – who really do use and love this feature when it works well. They don’t care what container format it uses; they care that, five years from now, they can long-press on a picture and hear their child’s tiny voice again. For them, the problem is not the concept, it’s the execution. And on Pixel, the execution just isn’t there yet.

What Google should fix

For Motion Photos on Pixel to feel worthy of the camera’s reputation, Google needs to rethink a few fundamentals:

• Prioritize natural motion over aggressive processing. For the motion segment, it may be better to lean on simpler, cleaner video frames, even if they are slightly noisier, rather than using heavily merged and stabilized frames that cause warping.
• Simplify the loop. The motion should play once smoothly or gently bounce, not jitter back and forth in a way that feels cheap or artificial.
• Give users smarter controls. Let people choose how Motion Photos are saved and shared: as stills only, as short videos, as GIF-like clips, or as fully combined motion+photo files.
• Make sharing painless. One-tap export to a regular video or animation that any website or app will accept would solve a lot of the “proprietary format” frustration.
• Optimize storage. Automated cleanup tools or space-efficient encoding could make the feature less intimidating for users with limited storage.

If Google insists on calling the feature “Motion Photos,” the result has to feel like a pleasant, natural moment in motion, not a stress test for its machine-learning stack.

Pixel users deserve memories, not glitches

It’s almost ironic: on paper, Pixel is the phone you recommend to people who want the best, most reliable photos with zero effort. Yet in this one very human area – capturing the feel of a moment, not just the look – Google lags behind a feature Apple introduced a decade ago.

For some Android users, that gap doesn’t matter; they’ll happily keep taking ordinary stills and call it a day. But for those who care about motion photos, the difference between Apple’s Live Photos and Pixel’s Motion Photos is night and day. One quietly enhances your memories; the other too often turns them into a psychedelic clip you’d rather not replay.

Google has already proven it can solve far harder imaging problems than this. Fixing Motion Photos is not about inventing something completely new; it’s about respecting the emotional purpose of the feature and dialing back the cleverness just enough to let the moment breathe. Pixel users don’t need more computational tricks here. They just need their memories to look and feel like reality again.