How to take snapshots of video on iPhone?

Want to capture your favorite movie scene and save them as still pictures? On an iPhone, you can do so without any third-party app. Just play the video or TV which you want to take a snapshot. Drag the slider to quickly jump to the point in the video you like to capture, then pause the video. Now press the Power+Home keys combination to do a screenshot. Your iPhone screen will flash and the screenshot will be saved to the ‘Screenshots‘ album in your Photo Library or Camera Roll. Using iPhone X without home button or can’t get the screen capture properly? Check out this tutorial to capture screen on iPhone.

This method however simply capture anything on your iPhone screen as an image in a fixed resolution and aspect ratio that are usually different from the source movie or video. All your screenshots are captured in the same width/height, it does not matter you are capturing a 4K UHD movie, 1080P HD video or a 360p video. Sometimes when your video can’t fill the full screen of iPhone, you will get the black areas around the video. If you take a screen of the video, you capture the black bars on the left/right or top/bottom as well.

A better way to take snapshots of your video and get high resolution still pictures is to use a video player or editor that offer the video snapshot feature. Here we’ll show you how to export frames from a video using Google Photos and ImgPlay GIF Maker. Both of them can help iPhone users easily grab still images from videos and movies.

Contents

  1. Export frames from videos using Google Photos;
  2. Grab frames from videos using ImgPlay app.

Method 1. Export frames from videos using Google Photos

Google Photos is a free app for both Android and iOS which lets you store, share, view, edit, manage photos and videos. Install the Google Photos app from the App Store if you haven’t already.

Open the app and sign in to your Google account. Tap to open the Photos tab in the lower left corner of your phone screen. Find the video that you want to extract a frame from and tap on it to open and play it.

While you are watching the video, you can tap anywhere on the video to show more options and controls. Tap on Edit button. After that, you will see more options to edit the video, such as Crop, Adjust, Filters. The thumbs viewer will appear under the preview window.

Google Photos app to edit video and export frames from video on iphone

Scrub through the video’s thumbs viewer at the lower section until you find the frame you want to export. Once you have found the frame, tap on the Export frame button below. The selected video frame will be exported as JPEG image to your photo library on iPhone. Open the Photos app on iPhone to find the extracted image and use it as you wish.

Method 2. Grab still images from videos using ImgPlay

ImgPlay is a GIF creator app, (free, in-app purchases available), on iPhone & iPad. Download this app for free from the App Store if you haven’t already. We can use this app to grab still images, pictures from iPhone videos without paying for a license or subscription to a plan.

Open the app on your device, you will be prompted to choose source files, videos, photos, GIFs or other compatible formats. Choose Video, then browse to the video albums in the Photos app to find the video and import it to the editor.

On the Edit screen you can find various tools you can make use of to edit the video, such as Canvas, Crop, Text, Filter, Sticker, Border, Speed, etc. At the top right corner, you can find the Save button along with the Frame View button.

imgplay edit GIF on iphone

Tap on Frame View to preview all frames and photos inside the video. Tap on the magnifier icon above a thumbnail to view the frame or image in full screen. Once the frame opens in full screen, tap on the Menu(three dots icon) at the top right corner to bring up the menu at the bottom of the screen. Choose Share or Save > Save Image to save the image frame from the GIF file to the Photos app on your iPhone. The exported frames will be saved as PNG images on your iPhone.

ImgPlay save, export video frame as image on iphone

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