I love my iPhone X. But I come neither to praise nor damn the phone. Instead, I want to rant about a particular user experience contained in IOS 11, the new version of the iPhone operating system introduced at the same time as the iPhone X.
I noticed, since I upgraded to the iPhone X, that the Camera app kept turning the “Live Photos” feature on, even though I was diligently turning it off.
Note that the instructions tell the user to turn this on so the feature won’t be automatically be turned on. Make sense?
I can’t remember when Live Photos was introduced on the iPhone. I do remember thinking that it was nifty way to make photos act like GIFs, until I discovered that they couldn’t be saved as GIFs. Apple was either unaware of the GIF format or unwilling to use a widely available format for their (emphasis on their) nifty new format.
As a result, I turned off Live Photos and forgot about it. I was still annoyed when people I know shared Live Photos, often unintentionally. I also thought that it would go away since sharing isn’t really sharing if it can only be shared with other iPhone users.
But someone inside Apple must be paid to keep Live Photos alive! In IOS 11, the Live Photos feature now turns on automatically every time you use the Camera app. So I found I was taking all my photos as Live Photos, even though I thought I had turned this stupid feature off. (Note that it still doesn’t use the GIF format for storing Live Photos.) So I used Google to discover that many other iPhone users were also annoyed and how to turn it off.
This is where the rant comes — to turn this “feature” off, you have to go to something called “Preserve Settings” in Settings for the Camera app. You have to first turn Preserve Settings: Live Photo on. Then you have to go back to Camera and turn Live Photo off! This then will tell the Camera app to preserve the setting of Live Photo off. In case you are confused, the helpful text says: “Preserve the Live Photo setting, rather than automatically reset to Live Photo turned on.” My high school teacher would have embarrassed me in front of class for writing this sentence.
Should you decide to use Live Photo again, in the future, and forget to turn it off, the Camera app will then preserve the Live Photo On setting and punish you for forgetting to turn Live Photo off before leaving the Camera app.
This is the Stupid Stuff that large companies do. Apple is supposed to be a better large company than other large companies, but it still does Stupid Stuff.