How To Grab a Frame From a Video In Mac Photos

If you need to grab a single frame from a video and turn it into a still image or add it to your Photos library, you can do it using a few steps even though a direct function for that doesn't exist in the current Photos app. Here are two methods you can use.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today I'm going to show you how to capture a frame from a video in the Mac Photos App. 
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Now sometimes you have a video in your Photos Library and you want to take a single frame from that and save that as a photo. This could happen because maybe you accidentally shot a video instead of a photo. Or maybe you later went back to a video that you took and find that there's a really great frame in there that will make a nice photo. Now I've seen people describe a variety of different ways to take a frame from a video and convert it to a photo. But a lot of them are a little too convoluted or produce results that aren't great quality. So here's a relatively straight forward technique that you could do using the Photos App and a couple of other things that come with your Mac. 
I'm in the Photos App and I'm going to go to my Videos, under Media Types, just so I can find a video. Let's go to this first video here. Let's say I want to grab a frame as a photo. There used to be a control here on the right side of the video playback controls that allowed you to export as a photo. But that's not there in the current version of the Photos App. So the way to do it now is to first take this video into an external editor. So you could be looking at the video like this or just have it selected in a list. Then go to Image and then Edit With. Here you're going to find a variety of different apps that can edit video. If you had a photo selected you would find apps here that could edit images. Now no matter what you have installed you're going to have Quick Time Player because Quick Time Player comes with your Mac. So I'm just going to use Quick Time Player here and this will open up this video in Quick Time Player. Now that we're in Quick Time Player we can go to the frame that we want to capture. Once we're there and we've got it just right, and you could use the arrow keys to go frame by frame to get the perfect one, then you could go to Edit, and Copy. This will copy the frame of the video as an image into the Clipboard. So now you can paste it where you want. In some cases you may want to paste it directly into some app. For instance in Mail, if you're composing a message and you just want to send this frame to somebody you can use Command V to paste the image into the message you're composing. If you're in Pages and you have a document open you could use Command V to paste the image directly into the document. 
But what if you want to save it as a file? Well, then you could do that by running an app that edits images, like for instance Acorn, Pixelmator Pro, Affinity Photo, or PhotoShop. Create a new document and paste it in there. But if you don't have any of those third party apps you could just use Preview that comes with your Mac. So I'm going to use Spotlight to launch Preview. Then Preview has a nice function File, New from Clipboard   or just Command N, that creates a new document and puts the clipboard into the document immediately. So with one step I've created a new document and that document has the image from the Clipboard. Now I can Save it and when I do I could I get to choose from a variety of formats that will remember your last one. So I can choose JPEG and put up here near Best as the best quality. I can name it what I want and save it where I want. I'll just save it to the Desktop. So you can see it appears here. 
Now if I want to bring this to my Photos Library all I need to do is drag and drop it into the Photos app. It will import it in. I will find it as the new item added to my Library. At that point, assuming you're using the default option in Photos where everything is imported into the Library I can then throw away the original file. 
Now there is a way to shorten the process a bit by cutting out Quick Time Player. You can Copy any frame you want from the video in the Photos App but you need to know a trick to do it. So, let's go into this video here and notice you can do Edit, Copy. But what you're going to get is you're going to get that first frame of the video. For instance, notice how the flag looks here in the first frame. If I go to another frame the flag looks different and I do Edit, Copy. Then I launch Preview and then do New From Clipboard you could see it clearly copied the first frame, not the current frame. However, if you go to Edit and then you look at the video down here you can move the playback around by clicking and dragging here. When you stop on a spot you see Make Poster Frame. Click that and it will turn the current frame into the poster frame and note that you have to hit the Done button for this to take effect. Then we can go back to the list. That's what we'll see as the poster frame. The frame that represents the entire video when you're simply looking at it here in a list or when you first go into it and you haven't started playing it yet. So you can see what it looks like here but the first frame, if I move the playback head, is this. So now what happens is when I do Edit, Copy it won't copy the first frame. It will copy the poster frame. In fact the default poster frame was the first frame. So it's always copying the poster frame. It's just now we moved that poster frame to another spot in the video. So now when I go to Preview and I create a new document from that we get the new poster frame.
So by setting the Poster Frame first you can just Edit, Copy in Photos and then go directly from Photos to Preview. Here I could save as a File and then import that file back into Photos. I think it's a pretty common thing to want to take a frame from a video and use that as a photo especially now that iPhones take 4K video. The frames themselves actually look pretty decent as photos. So hopefully at some point Apple will add back a function in the Photos App to export a current frame from a video as a photo so we can do it in one quick step instead of having to use Quick Time Player and Preview to get there.

Comments: 7 Responses to “How To Grab a Frame From a Video In Mac Photos”

Jeanne Dyer

4 years ago

Great tip I could have used yesterday when editing a video in iMovie. I needed a copy of a frame in iMovie to add a few seconds to the very beginning of a clip before the VoiceOver and was unable to expand the clip by changing the transition time or adding a freeze frame. I thought about adding a photo of that first frame, but did not know how to do it. I tried the QuickTime/Preview and Voila! perfect. Thanks again, Gary!!

Gary Rosenzweig

Jeanne: For that purpose Freeze Frame should have worked.

Stephen Schulte

Gary --- This is really useful!! I do this a lot as I take videos of my high power rockets taking-off and then do screen grabs. Since I am still on macOS 10.14.6 Mojave with one Mac, I can send a frame to "Pictures" via the gearbox (no longer available on Big Sur macOS 11.3)(why not?!?!) -- but that image is generally about 8 mb in size and defaults to TIFF. (With GraphicConverter or Preview I can change that of course, but why such a big file?). More next comment…

OK so your method (video export to 'desktop' or elsewhere and open in Preview 'New from Clipboard' is great. One can also use the Screenshot app (in the Utilities folder) - but best to do this by having Screenshot in the Dock, then right-clicking to open the screenshot 'screen' - choosing the exact size of the photo and then clicking on CAPTURE with the mouse. This is fast but the quality of the jpg photo done this way is not as good; that said the file size is a lot smaller. Thanks again!

Stephen: As I mention, a screenshot will not get you the best quality. I wouldn't do that. You are already at a disadvantage as a frame of a video isn't nearly as good quality as a photo. When you take your videos of rockets, why not snap photos when you can at the same time. You can do that on the iPhone and many other cameras. Or, have a second camera for that purpose.

Gary: Great comment - YES you are correct, the 'screenshot' is a lower quality. For photos taken from the ground I use my iPhone & a Nikon S9900. (Someday I'll get a Digital reflex camera with the ability to take like 30+ shots/second…). But I was referring to videos taken with my Mobius Mini camera which is mounted on the outside of the rocket. Your method of opening in QuickTime & then copying/opening in Preview is the best!

Stephen: What, you don't strap yourself onto the rocket to take pictures? LOL. 😂 Thanks!

Comments Closed.

How To Grab a Frame From a Video In Mac Photos

Comments: 7 Responses to “How To Grab a Frame From a Video In Mac Photos”

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