Preview from Photos or Files
Check a local video or photo against the social layouts with no computer, no network, and no subscription — plus the iCloud download path and its errors.
Preview from Photos or Files opens a video or a still from your phone in the same monitor the live stream uses: pinch to zoom, layout overlays, frame stepping, save a frame. No computer, no Wi-Fi, no host application.
This mode is never gated. There is no subscription check anywhere on the path — the app deliberately opens to its normal interface with no launch wall so this stays usable. The Pro caps that do apply here are the same ones that apply everywhere: layouts and the pinch-zoom ceiling. See Free vs Pro.
Use it to check a finished export against the TikTok or Reels chrome before you post, or to look at a reference frame someone sent you at the right scale.
Two entry points
Both live on the Home screen:
- On the empty state, the Preview from Photos or Files button — Open a local video or photo, no Mac or PC needed.
- On the populated list, the Preview from Photos or Files row, in its own section under the connect actions.
Either opens a menu with two choices:
| Choice | Opens |
|---|---|
| Photo Library | The system photo picker, filtered to videos and images, single selection. |
| Files | The system file importer, restricted to movie and image types, single selection. |
The menu anchors to the row you tapped rather than floating to the top of the screen.
Supported sources
Any video or image the system can hand over. The picker asks for a compatible representation rather than the original, so HEVC clips, slow-motion, and formats that need transcoding are all delivered as something the player can open. Images come through unchanged.
Files-sourced media is copied into the app's own temporary storage before playback, so the original is never touched.
Picking from the Photo Library needs no permission prompt — the picker runs out of process. The one exception is described under iCloud clips below.
What differs from the live view
The monitor is the same instrument pointed at a different source, so most of it is identical. Three things are missing and one is added.
| Live view | Preview from Photos or Files | |
|---|---|---|
| Audio button | Yes | No — the clip plays its own audio; there is no host stream to mute |
| Resolution chip | Yes | No — nothing is being encoded |
| Stats strip | Optional | No |
| Settings | Full encoding panel | A small card: Controls, Hide after, Max zoom only |
| Transport | Five buttons | Five buttons plus a scrub slider |
| Layouts | Yes | Yes, identical |
| Save frame | Yes | Yes, identical |
| Pinch, pan, double-tap, tap-to-toggle | Yes | Yes, identical |
The HUD row here is: house (closes the clip), save frame, layout, gear.
The scrub slider is the visible difference — the live view has no timeline to scrub.
The scrub slider
Elapsed time on the left, duration on the right, both m:ss. Dragging pauses playback and seeks with a coarse tolerance so the thumb tracks your finger; letting go lands exactly on the final frame. The chrome auto-hide timer is suspended for the whole drag.
The outer transport buttons here are Go to start and Go to end rather than In and Out points — a local file has no in/out marks. Frame stepping moves exactly one encoded frame at a time.
A still image gets no transport bar at all.
Settings
Every knob here is the same stored setting the live view edits — the two monitors read and write one preference set.
Change Controls or Max zoom here and the live view picks it up, and vice versa. Max zoom carries the same 4× free-tier cap and the same lock. See Encoding settings for the full ranges.
iCloud clips
If a clip is not stored on the device — iCloud Photos with Optimize iPhone Storage on — the out-of-process picker cannot materialize it. The app falls back to a lower-level path that copies the original bytes with network access allowed, which downloads the clip.
That fallback needs read access to the photo library, and it is requested lazily, at exactly that moment. A clip already on the device never triggers a prompt.
The purpose string reads:
PreviewMonitor needs access to load the clip you pick for monitoring, including downloading it from iCloud if it isn't stored on this device.
Large clips take time. There is no progress bar for the download — the picker simply returns when it is done, or with one of the errors below.
Errors you may see
Alerts from the Files path appear under the title Couldn't open that file. Photo-library errors appear the same way.
| Message | Cause |
|---|---|
| Couldn't download this iCloud clip. Your iPhone may be low on storage, so free up some space and try again. | iCloud could not deliver the original. In practice this is almost always no room on the device to land it. |
| Couldn't download that clip from iCloud: … | Any other iCloud failure; the system's own reason is appended. |
| Photo access is needed to load iCloud clips. Enable it in Settings. | The read prompt was declined. |
| Photo access is needed to load iCloud clips. Enable it in Settings → PreviewMonitor → Photos. | Read access was already denied earlier, so there is no prompt to show — only the Settings path. |
| Couldn't find that clip in your library. | The asset disappeared between picking and loading. |
| That clip has no video data. | The asset carries no playable video track. |
| Couldn't load that video… | Both in-process loaders failed and there was no asset identifier to fall back on. |
| Couldn't import that video. | The file was fetched but could not be written to the app's temporary storage. |
| Couldn't load that image. / Couldn't read that image. | The image could not be decoded. |
| Unsupported file type. | The item is neither a movie nor an image. |
If a clip refuses to open, the reliable workaround is to force it onto the device first: open it in Photos and let it download fully, then pick it again.
Audio
The clip plays its own audio through the device's current output. The monitor takes the audio session for playback while it is open and releases it when you close the clip — it never runs at the same time as the streamed-audio engine, which only exists during a live session.
Closing
The house button stops playback, releases the audio session, and returns to the Home screen. Temporary copies of imported files are cleared by Reset App… in Privacy and data, and by iOS itself as it reclaims space.
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