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Instagram just solved my biggest gripe with Live Photos on the new iPhone

One of the most important new features in the iPhone 6S is called Live Photos, which automatically records a little video before and after your still photos. When you press down on the photo, it appears to come alive. 

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It's a clever feature, and fun to show off to friends who don't have an iPhone 6S.

But good luck sharing a Live Photo in another app like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or through a text message with a non-iPhone user.

Instagram solved part of that problem Thursday. Instagram, the largest photo-sharing social network by a longshot, launched an app called Boomerang, which lets you create a GIF-like image that you can share on Instagram.

Like this:

Right out the gate, Boomerang gives Instagram a big jump ahead of Apple's Live Photos.

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I've been using an iPhone 6S for about a month, and I love Live Photos. But my biggest problem with it is that I can't really share them with my 18,000+ Twitter followers, hundreds of Facebook friends, or Instagram followers. Boomerang solves that problem, and I don't even need an iPhone 6S to make those clever animated photos.

To be fair, Facebook has already said it will enable Live Photos soon. And the iPhone 6S has only been out for a little over a month. There's always a chance other apps can add it too.

But a lot of developers don't have the best track record when it comes to enabling new iPhone features in their apps. For example, there are still loads of apps in the App Store that haven't resized to the larger screen that first debuted on the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6S.

That means for now, Instagram has a big advantage over Apple's Live Photos.

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