Lively

A flat-design Live Photo editor for iPhone — filters, soundtracks, trims, and true Live Photo export.

🌐 Try it in your browser: a live web edition of the editor — same filters, soundtrack lane, and trims on a sample clip or your own video — runs at weikezhang.cn/lively. No install, nothing uploaded.

Lively opens the Live Photos already in your library — or turns any video into one — and gives them a real editor: twelve filter looks with intensity blending, eight fine adjustments, a soundtrack lane with waveform trimming and voiceover recording, and a filmstrip trim. Every edit previews live, per frame, while the video plays. When you're done, Lively writes a genuine Live Photo back to your library — a properly paired still and video that presses-and-holds like any other — or renders a shareable MP4. Built entirely with SwiftUI and the Observation framework, zero third-party dependencies.

Flat-design mockups of the shipping UI.

Features

Filters & Adjustments

• 12 filter presets — Original, Vivid, Golden, Coastal, Fade, Matte, Dusk, Pop, Sepia, Chrome, Mono, Noir — with per-preset thumbnails rendered from your photo.
• Intensity blending — dial any filter from 0 to 100% over the untouched frame.
• 8 fine adjustments — exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation, vibrance, warmth, vignette, and sharpness, layered on top of the selected filter.
• Instant preview — a per-frame Core Image video composition reads the current edit through a thread-safe VisualStateBox, so dragging a slider restyles the playing video immediately. No player rebuilds, no stutter.

Soundtrack

• Import music from any audio file, or record a voiceover in place.
• Waveform trim — pick the exact slice of the track with a visual waveform.
• Timeline offset — delay where the clip starts against the video.
• Volume, fade in, fade out for the soundtrack, plus a mix/mute control for the original audio that remembers your level when you unmute.
• Volume and fade tweaks swap in a new audio mix on the running player — no rebuild.

Trim

• Filmstrip trimming — drag in/out handles over evenly spaced frames of the clip.
• Trims flow through one EditState document, so the preview and the export always agree.

Video → Live Photo

• Convert any video into a Live Photo: pick a segment, choose the key frame that becomes the still, and the converted pair drops straight into the same editor.

Export

• Save as a real Live Photo — Lively renders the edited still and video, links them with a shared content identifier and a still-image-time metadata track (the same pairing Photos uses), and saves via add-only photo permission.
• Share as MP4 — a flat video with filters, trim, and the full audio mix baked in, handed to the system share sheet.
• Press-and-hold preview — assemble a true PHLivePhoto in the editor and feel the result before saving.
• Picking is permissionless: the system PhotosPicker runs out of process, so Lively never asks to read your library.

How it works

One value-typed EditState document drives everything. Views mutate it; the model routes each change down the cheapest path (visual → shared state box, mix → new audio mix, structural → debounced rebuild); and the exporter consumes the same document, so what you preview is what you save.

flowchart LR
    pick["Pick a Live Photo<br/>(or convert a video)"] --> extract["Extract pair<br/>still + paired video"]
    extract --> state["EditState<br/>filters · adjustments · audio · trim"]
    state --> preview["Real-time preview<br/>per-frame Core Image<br/>via VisualStateBox"]
    state --> render["Export render<br/>edits baked in"]
    render --> assemble["LivePhotoAssembler<br/>content identifier +<br/>still-image-time metadata"]
    assemble --> photos["Photos library<br/>(add-only permission)"]
    render --> share["Shareable MP4"]

Loading

For the full story — the change-routing rules, the composition pipeline, and how the assembler pairs the files — see docs/ARCHITECTURE.md.

Getting Started

Requirements: Xcode 16+, an iPhone running iOS 17 or later.

git clone https://github.com/shoal-rat/Lively.git
cd Lively
open Lively.xcodeproj

1. In Xcode, select the Lively target → Signing & Capabilities → choose your signing team.
2. Select your iPhone as the run destination and press Run.

Note

Run on a real device for the full experience. The iOS Simulator's photo library contains no Live Photos by default, so the picker will come up empty there — video conversion still works, but the app is built for hardware.

Project Structure

Lively/
├── Models/       # Value types: EditState, FilterPreset, VisualState
├── Theme/        # FlatTheme design tokens + shared flat components
├── Core/         # Engines: Live Photo loader, filter engine, composition
│                 # builder, assembler, exporter, video converter,
│                 # audio recorder, waveform extractor
├── ViewModels/   # EditorViewModel — the single observable session model
└── Views/        # HomeView, EditorView, tool panels, reusable components

Deeper reading:

• docs/ARCHITECTURE.md — the preview pipeline, edit-state routing, and export path in detail.
• docs/DEVELOPMENT_NOTES.md — practical notes, gotchas, and decisions made along the way.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md for how to get set up and what makes a good change.

License

Lively is available under the MIT License.