Loop a Video on iPhone: Photos, Live Photo and GIF

You’ve got a clip you want playing on repeat, the kind of thing you’d send as a reaction or set as a wallpaper preview, and you go looking for a loop button in Photos.

For a Live Photo, there’s one. For a plain video, there isn’t, and no amount of tapping around the playback screen will produce it. Here’s what’s actually there, and the one workaround that reliably gets you a loop.

What actually loops, and what doesn’t

Photos treats these as two different kinds of media, and only one of them ships with a loop feature. A Live Photo captures 1.5 seconds before and after you tap the shutter, and Apple built a real Loop effect on top of that captured motion, alongside Bounce and Long Exposure.

A standard video file has none of that. It plays from the first frame to the last and stops. There’s no setting under playback, no toggle in the share sheet, nothing hiding in a long press.

If you came here because a video you shot just won’t repeat itself, that’s not a setting you’re missing — it genuinely isn’t there for video files.

Loop a Live Photo (the real, native path)

This one works exactly as advertised:

1. Open Photos and find the Live Photo. It’s marked with the concentric-circles Live badge in the top-left corner of the thumbnail.
2. Tap to open it, then tap the Live Photo button near the top of the screen (the same concentric-circles icon).
3. Choose Loop from the effects that appear. Bounce and Long Exposure sit right next to it if you want to compare.

Loop stitches the captured frames so the clip repeats cleanly instead of snapping back to the start. Once applied, tapping and holding the photo plays the looped version, and it stays looped when you share it to Messages or save it — though sharing over Mail flattens it to a still, same as any Live Photo.

One limitation worth knowing before you try this on old footage: the effect only works on photos captured as Live Photos in the first place. If Live Photo was switched off when you took the shot, or the video came from anywhere other than your own Camera app, there’s no Live Photo data to loop.

Why there’s no equivalent for a real video

The Loop effect isn’t a generic video trick, it’s specific to the small buffer of frames a Live Photo captures around the moment you tap the shutter. A standard video, even one 2 seconds long, doesn’t carry that same structure, and Apple hasn’t added a loop-on-playback toggle to the regular video player in Photos.

This is worth saying plainly because a lot of the advice floating around conflates the two and tells people to look for a loop icon on a video that will never show one.

The honest workaround: convert it to a GIF

A GIF loops by definition wherever it’s viewed — Messages, Safari, most apps that render one at all will play it on repeat with no setting required.

That makes it the actual fix when what you want is a video that keeps playing rather than a photo effect. Trim the clip down to the part worth repeating first; a GIF of a 30-second video gets heavy fast and the app you’re sharing it through may compress it into mush.

The steps for turning a clip into a proper looping GIF are covered in converting a video to a GIF on iPhone, including how to keep the file size sane.

If the footage you’re trying to loop started life as a Live Photo rather than a recorded video, you don’t need the Loop effect at all — converting it straight to GIF is often the better move, especially if you’re sending it to an Android phone or anywhere that won’t render Live Photos properly.

That path is its own walkthrough at turning a Live Photo into a GIF on iPhone.

And if you’re starting from nothing — no Live Photo, no video, just an idea for a looping clip — the general GIF-building process is at making a GIF on iPhone.

What about Shortcuts?

It’s a reasonable next question: if Photos can’t loop a video, can an automation fake it by stitching the clip to itself a few times? In practice, no reliable native action exists in Shortcuts for concatenating or re-encoding video clips, so building a repeat-N-times export isn’t something that holds up as a real recommendation here.

Where Shortcuts genuinely helps is the conversion step itself — turning the video into a GIF once you’ve trimmed it.

Grabio, the free iPhone Shortcut I built for file and media conversion, handles that conversion on-device with no account and nothing to unlock: share the clip, pick Convert to GIF, and it hands back a file that loops the moment anything opens it. You can grab it at grabio.adityaarsharma.com.

Frequently asked questions

Does Photos have a loop button for regular videos?

No. The Loop effect only exists for Live Photos, applied through the Live Photo button when you open one. A standard video plays once and stops, with no native setting to repeat it.

How do I get a Live Photo to loop?

Open the Live Photo, tap the Live Photo button near the top of the screen, then choose Loop. Bounce and Long Exposure are offered alongside it.

Why did my Live Photo lose its Loop effect after I shared it?

Sharing over Mail sends a Live Photo as a static image, which drops any effect applied to it. Messages and AirDrop preserve the Live Photo and whatever effect you chose.

What’s the actual fix if I need a video to repeat when I share it?

Convert it to a GIF. GIFs loop automatically in almost anything that displays one, which makes them the practical stand-in for a native video loop feature that doesn’t exist.

Can I loop a video that wasn’t shot as a Live Photo?

Not through the Loop effect, since that only works on Live Photo data captured at the moment of shooting. Converting the video to a GIF is the route that works regardless of how the clip was originally recorded.