The Camera app on your iPhone gives you a variety of different ways to capture images and record videos.
Once you have created these files you can open the Photos app and view them there. If you download pictures or videos from other locations, such as the Messages app, they will appear in the Photos app, too.
But as you scroll through the photos app to look at everything that is there, you might notice that the videos and Live photos will start playing automatically. While this can be good in some situations, it might not be something that you like.
You can turn off the autoplay setting for videos and Live Photos on your iPhone 13 by going to Settings > Photos > and disabling the Auto-Play Videos and Live Photos setting.
Once that option is turned off you will be able to scroll through your Photos app and the videos and pictures that previously played on their own will now have a Play button that you will need to press.
You can continue reading below for more about enabling or disabling this autoplay option on your iPhone, as well as additional information about the rest of the settings that you will find when you open the Photos settings menu.
How to Turn Off Video Auto Play on an iPhone 13
- Tap Settings.
- Choose Photos.
- Turn off Auto-Play Videos and Live Photos.
Our guide continues below with more information on changing this setting that controls the way videos and Live Photos work in the Photos app on your iPhone 13, including pictures of these steps.
How to Disable the Automatic Video Playback in the iPhone 13 Photos App (Guide with Pictures)
The steps in this article were performed on an iPhone 13 in the iOS 15.4.1 operating system.
Step 1: Open the Settings app.
Step 2: Scroll down and select the Photos option.
Step 3: Tap the button to the right of Auto-Play Videos and Live Photos.
Our tutorial continues below with additional discussion about changing settings for the iPhone 13 Photos app.
More Information on Preventing iPhone 13 Videos and Live Photos from Starting Automatically
When you complete the steps above it changes the behavior of videos and live photos in your Photos app.
You will still be able to watch videos in the Photos app and see the movement in Live Photos by tapping on them.
This won’t affect any video playback in any of the other apps on your device. This setting specifically controls the interactions for those types of files that are in your Camera Roll and other albums in the iPhone’s default Photos app.
There are a lot of other options on the Photos settings menu that you can adjust to better suit the way that you want your photo gallery to behave. These settings include:
- iCloud Photos – moves pictures and videos to Apple’s cloud storage
- Optimize iPhone Storage/Download and Keep Originals – this is a good way to manage your storage space by keeping lower-resolution versions of images on your phone while storing the full size images in iCloud
- Shared Albums – you can share your albums with other people and accept invitations to view the albums that they have shared with you
- Hidden Album – toggles the display of the “hidden” album on your phone
- Cellular Data – lets you decide whether photo uploads should occur over cellular and wi-fi, or just wi-fi.
- Auto-Play Videos and Live Photos – the setting from this article
- View Full HDR – lets you view the full color range of the photos in your album
- Reset Suggested Memories – lets you manage the cache of suggested memories
- Reset People Suggestions – removes the current automatic sorting or people that appear in your images
- Show Holiday Events – whether or not to include local holidays in your albums
- Transfer to Mac or PC – Automatic/Keep Originals – lets you decide the file types for images that you transfer from your iPhone to your computer
As you can see, these options provide ways for you to manage the amount of storage that your photos consume, the way that your iPhone handles various memories and categorizations, and what happens when you want to back up pictures to the cloud or a computer.
Matthew Burleigh has been writing technology how-to articles and tutorials for over a decade. He has extensive experience in information technology both in small business and as a consultant.
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