SnapThread 1.1 with Live Photo Support

I have a confession to make: I released SnapThread too early. I thought it was a good MVP (minimum viable product), but I was wrong. It was a little too buggy, and didn’t have a real “killer” feature.

The good news is, SnapThread 1.1 is now available, and it’s what I should have waited to release in the first place. I’m hoping that with the addition of Live Photo support, SnapThread can now be people’s go-to app for quick, easy portrait video compilations.

New features:

  • Live Photo support! SnapThread will strip the 3 second videos from your Live Photos and allows you to stitch them together.
  • The app now presents the native iOS share sheet upon successful export.
  • New duration limits. Filter your photo library by videos under 10, 15, 30, or 60 seconds.

Improvements/Bug fixes:

  • Faster exporting, and fixed a bug where the exporting would fail when trying to merge over 16 videos at once.
  • Better progress reporting. Downloading lots of videos from iCloud can take awhile, and now the app more accurately reflects the download’s current progress.
  • Smart aspect ratio: since Live Photos are 3:4 and regular videos are 9:16, SnapThread chooses the final video’s aspect ratio based on what you have more of. So if you have 45 Live Photos and 1 video you want to merge, the final video will be 3:4. Likewise, if you have lots of widescreen videos and only a few Live Photos, the final video will be 9:16. (you should see the tangled if-else statements that determine the video clips’ scaling and translation values…it’s terrifying).

Since “the proof of the pudding is in the eating,” here’s a video of Charlie’s day at the pumpkin patch that I stitched together from Live Photos (and one video):

Future plans/ideas for the app:

  • Photo library album picker (so you can find clips more easily)
  • Scaling improvements and fixes (I’m sure there’s some edge cases I missed!!
  • Ability to mute individual clips?
  • Ability to add a very simple title to beginning of video?
  • New localizations
  • Accessibility improvements
  • iPad version??