If you’re thinking of posting a video on a social media account, you might want to loop it. Looping a video makes it infinitely more fun. Even though Instagram may have first launched it, it’s become a standard feature across many apps.

But if you’re thinking of looping a video straight from the Photos app on your iPhone, you’re in for some disappointment. There’s no feature to loop your videos in the Photos app on iPhone. If you’re thinking that you have seen it, here’s some news for you. You can loop Live photos on iPhone, which are quite different from videos. But there’s no need to surrender arms yet. What are we always saying? “Where there’s a will, there’s an app.” And for sure, there are tons of apps you could find in the App Store for looping a video.

Just to be on the safe side of things, we’ll guide you through looping a live photo as well using a third-party app to loop a video. So, let’s get on with it.

Looping a Live Photo

Live Photos may look like photos, but they aren’t really photos. They are very tiny videos. When you go on to capture a live photo, iPhone captures the additional moments that happened 1.5 seconds before and after the moment. So, essentially, what we get is a short 3-second video. Since in essence, it is a video, you can loop it.

Open the Photos app and go to the ‘Albums’ tab.

Then, go to ‘Live Photos’ from Media Types.

Tap and open the live photo you want to loop. Tap the photo if there are no options visible on the screen. Then, tap the ‘Live’ option in the top-left corner of the screen.

A few options would appear. Now, if you want the video to simply play in a loop, i.e, it starts as soon as it ends, playing in a continuous loop, tap the option for ‘Loop’.

But if you want the Boomerang effect of Instagram, tap the ‘Bounce’ option instead. It’ll loop the video so that it plays in the forward and reverse directions.

You can then share it and it’ll go as a video whereas a live photo doesn’t.

Looping a Video

You can use a third-party app from the App Store, or you can even use Boomerang to loop your videos.

Using Boomerang for Looping Videos

Boomerang can be used as a separate app or from within Instagram itself. Most of us use Boomerang to especially create a looping effect video. But you can also use it to loop existing videos and live photos on your iPhone.

We’ll be using the Boomerang feature from within the Instagram app for this guide, but you can also download and use the standalone app. Open the Instagram app on your iPhone and log in to your account.

Then, either swipe to the right from your feed or tap the ‘+’ icon in the top-right corner of the screen and then select ‘Story’.

To make an existing live photo into a boomerang, swipe up from the Story screen to open your camera roll photos.

Then, tap the ‘Recent’ option to switch to the Live Photos album instead. Then, tap ‘Live Photos’ from the album options. This way you can find the live photo quickly. You can skip this step if the live photo you intend to convert into a boomerang is recent.

You’ll notice that live photos will have a boomerang icon on thumbnails. Tap the photo to load it.

The live photo will load onto the story screen. Now, either tap and hold anywhere on the screen or tap the ‘Boomerang’ icon (Infinity symbol) to convert it into a boomerang.

You can either save the looped video to your camera roll or share it to your Instagram story or with friends. To save it to your camera roll, tap the three-dot menu in the top-right corner, then tap ‘Save’.

Just like we chose the live photo, we can also choose an existing video from the camera roll. The only difference is that when looping a video on Boomerang, there is a constraint on the length. You can only convert a small portion of the video into a boomerang. Select the video from your camera roll and tap the ‘Boomerang’ icon.

Then, select the part of the video you wish to turn into the boomerang by dragging the selector at the bottom. Tap ‘Apply’ after you have selected the video portion.

You can also choose from options like ‘Classic’, ‘Slo-mo’, ‘Echo’, and ‘Duo’ effects for your Boomerang. Tap the appropriate option from the bottom of the screen.

Tap ‘Done’ in the upper-right corner of the screen.

The part of the video will be converted to a boomerang which you can either save to your camera roll or share on Instagram.

Use Boomerang Maker from App Store

If you want to loop a complete video, not just a tiny portion of it as Boomerang does, you can use one of the many apps available in the App Store. We tried a few of these apps, such as Looper, Loop Videos, and Boomerang Maker for looping videos. Of these, we’ve chosen Boomerang Maker for the purpose of this guide, as we thought it was by far the best, although Loop Videos came in a close second. All of these apps use a freemium model, where some features are available for free and you have to purchase the more premium features.

Boomerang Maker makes it rather simple to loop and save your video. You can also loop your live photos using the app. Go to the App Store and tap the ‘Get’ button to install Boomerang Maker.

Then, open the app. The very first option you’d see as soon as you open the app is to give the app access to your camera roll. You can either tap ‘Allow Access to All Photos’ or tap ‘Select Photos’ and select the videos you want to have the app access to.

Select the video you want to loop. Then, choose the length of the video you want to loop. The app lets you loop the entire video or trim it. Adjust the ends of the sliders to trim the video and tap ‘Next’ at the bottom of the screen.

Then, tap the direction you want to loop the video in. Only one option is available for free. To use the rest, you’ll need to upgrade to Pro.

Next, swipe left on the lower part of the screen to get to the next option. Adjust the slider to slow down or speed up the video.

Swipe again to adjust the number of repetitions. Only 1 repetition is available for free, but premium users can select up to 4 repetitions.

Note: Loop Videos does offer two directions as well two repetitions for free if you want to check it out. But the experience wasn’t as smooth as Boomerang Maker, hence the decision to use this app for the purpose of our guide.

Tap ‘Save’ to save your looped video.

Select the format you want to save it in. You can either choose ‘Video’ or ‘GIF’. Then, select whether you want to save it to your gallery or share it on a social media platform.

Whether you want to loop a video or a live photo, there are plenty of options available at your disposal. With third-party apps, the whole task takes just a matter of seconds.