Live Photos for all! Google Photos now lets you share and view your moving pictures over iOS, Android, and PC

A couple of years ago, Apple introduced its “Live Photos” — a feature, which has the phone's camera record a short video that spans the time just before and just after you press the shutter button. Photos are viewable as normal, but force-pressing (or just long pressing if you don't have 3D Touch) makes them “come alive” with the frames that were captured just before and just after. A neat little feature, great for capturing family moments with that fidgety little one, pets, fireworks, and other unpredictable stuff.

For quite a while, Live Photos have been an exclusive club. If you wanted to share one, you could only send it off to another iPhone. Some large social media apps, like Facebook, also enabled support for them, but again — only viewable on iOS devices. Some apps did pop up that allowed you to transform them into GIFs or short videos, but that's a few loopholes too many for your casual sharing experience.

Now that Google has introduced Motion Photos with its new Pixel phones (currently only available on the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL, fingers crossed for updates), the company has also updated its Google Photos platform to be able to store and play back the moving pictures. Yes, being the inclusive folks they are, Google treats both the iPhone's Live Photos and the Pixel's Motion Photos the same.

So, if you have an iPhone but use the Google Photo cloud to store your images, your Live Photos will now be viewable on Android devices and even the desktop version over at photos.google.com. The same goes for the Pixel Motion Photos — they are backed up to Google Photos by default and sharing their moving goodness with anyone is now easy as pie.

Google Photos: iOS | Android