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I'm not interested in "live photos" like flowing water or a burning flame in an otherwise still photograph.

The kind of photographs I'm interested in is like "a person moves his/her head a little or winks (like 1/3 second), and then remains in a final position" - it ends just like a normal still photograph, no matter how long you look at it. The effect appears only for a short while flipping to a next shot.

How is this kind of effect called? How do I create and view these photographs? (iPhone, Android, computer)

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"Live Photos" are native to iOS. You enable them in the Camera app - see the icon inside the red rectangle.

enter image description here

Android has an equivalent, but it's not something I'm familiar with.

The phone itself takes both a still & a short video, then combines them in such a way as to always recognise them as a 'pair in a single file'.
Once exported from the phone, Macs will continue recognise & play these the same way, without issue. Windows doesn't recognise them properly & you will end up with 2 files.

Older phones take a .jpg & a short .mov, newer phones can use HEIC/HEIV.

I doubt you'll find this functionality at present in anything other than phones.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ I made it work in Android 11 by enabling "Movement" option in the camera + HEIF format usage. Browsing in Google Photos shows a "Live Photo" movement equivalent. The exported file to a PC looks like a normal .jpg file though. \$\endgroup\$
    – user681768917
    Oct 11, 2021 at 20:13
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Looks like a plain GIF to me. GIFs can be single-shot animations and don't need to loop forever. The WebP format could be a good alternative if supported by your target (AFAIK it is supported by all major browsers now). It also supports single-shot animation and the image quality can be much better than GIF (it uses full RGB when GIF is limited by a 256-entries color map).

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This isn't really a photography question.

I don't know of any ready-made solution, but what you are talking about is a video - made of separate frames, with the final frame being displayed indefinitely at the end.

If someone gave me this as the spec for a paid project, my solution would probably be something custom programmed in JavaScript for display on the web.

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    \$\begingroup\$ In purely technical terms, it indeed is a very short video stopped at the last frame. But from the user's point of view it's a photograph, not a video. I think we need to adapt the definition what the 'photograph' is. Some 30 years ago it would have been just something on a paper... \$\endgroup\$
    – user681768917
    Sep 28, 2021 at 20:04
  • \$\begingroup\$ OK, rather than get into the semantics of what is and isn't a photograph, we are trying to solve a real-world problem here. What you need is a series of frames. How I would solve your problem is just as I have said above. Calling it a photograph doesn't make it any easier to solve. \$\endgroup\$
    – osullic
    Sep 28, 2021 at 21:00

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