Instagram's Boomerang Joins Moving Photos Craze

Why your photo album of the future will include moving memories.

ByABC News
October 22, 2015, 3:37 PM
Images posted to the Instagram blog showing the Boomerang app.
Images posted to the Instagram blog showing the Boomerang app.
Instagram

— -- The photo album of the future is going to include a lot of moving images capturing snippets of the moments you want to remember the most.

Instagram today unveiled Boomerang, a photo app that takes a burst of photos and stitches them together into a one second video loop that plays forward and backward.

As the third standalone app outside of Instagram, Boomerang is most fun for catching big moments of action, such as blowing out birthday candles or a cannon ball into the pool. Memories created in the app can be saved to a user’s camera roll and shared on Instagram, giving you another way to spice of your friends' photo feeds.

Apple's Live Photos

Instagram’s entry into the world of moving memories comes one month after Apple showed off the "Live Photos" feature of the new iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus that lets users also press on a photo to see a short video, since the camera records 1.5 seconds of video before and after the picture is taken.

Apple's Live Photos

A new icon on the camera status bar makes it easy to take Live Photos, just as you take a traditional photo. While it's currently only available on the newest iPhones, live photos can be viewed across other Apple devices.

At the heart of it all is a static 12 megapixel photo. The feature is perfect for catching moments such as a baby learning to walk or an incredible wave at the beach. They're moments you want to see and hear snippets of, but also ones where the photographer may want a high quality traditional photo.

PHHHOTO

PHHHOTO, an app so loud it demands three H's in a row, offers an edgier take in the world of moving photos. Already available on iOS, the company today released an Android version of its app.

PHHHOTO captures four frames and stitches them together. What makes it different from other options is it allows users to speed up or slow down their frame rate, giving their moving memories an artsier touch. After that, the loops can be blasted out to your friends on Twitter and Instagram.

If any more proof was needed that moving photos are having their moment, look no further than Facebook profile photos. The social network announced last month it was adding support for users to take a short looping profile video to add a new dimension to their page.