How To Get Photo From Video On Iphone

Recently someone asked me how to turn a video into a photo on iPhone. It is a sport video and he wants to take photos out of the video for sharing on his blog. The easiest way to extract pictures from a video on iPhone or iPad is to take a screenshot on the iOS device. Just open the Camera Roll or Photos app on the device, find and play the video, then pause at the video frame which you like to grab and save as image file, finally press the home and sleep buttons simultaneously. You can refer to previous linked article for more details about how to capture screen on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. The method to capture screen on iPhone X can also be found in the above guide.

This method however has its drawbacks. For example, it is not very easy to find the best picture from the video as you can't preview the frames one by one. What's worse, the picture quality is limited to your display resolution. For instance, if you extract a frame or picture from a video on iPhone 7 Plus, the image will be 1920*1080p, it is 1334*750p for iPhone 7, 2048*1536p for iPad Air 2, iPad mini 4, iPad mini 2. What you get may not be the actual full resolution of source video file.

Method 1. Extract photos from videos on iPhone iPad using the Grabber

This video to photo converter for iPhone is a light-weight app makes grabbing stills from video files snap. No trip to the computer is needed. You can import recorded videos from Camera roll to this video to photo grabber app.

video to photo grabber app - select and import video

Then inspect the video frame by frame to locate the precise frame you want, tap the Save button in the top right corner of the screen, the still picture will be saved to your Camera Roll.

video to photo grabber app - select and export photo

Method 2. Converting video to pictures on computer – FREE tools

I tried several 'video to photo converter' app downloaded from App Store trying to get still picture with full HD quality. But none of them can do that unless you upgrade to the premium version. In fact, these free apps I have tried can only export very low quality pictures from videos, even worse than a screenshot on the device. It is difficult to find a really free app that can export photos from videos on iPhone and iPad. Whereas on the computer, we have a lot of free software tools can do that, notably VLC media player. Thus if you still trying to figure out how to export full HD high resolution images from a video on iPhone, iPad or iPod touch without any fee, we recommend you export the videos to a computer first, then use VLC media player take a video snapshot on your computer. It is free and open source.

Method 3. Convert video to photo using Photoshop?

Photoshop is a very popular image editor with web designers. It is best-known as a image editor, in fact we can also find some very useful video editing features, such as converting photos to slideshow video, making animated GIF pictures, extracting frames from videos.

Update Jun 2018: this article was originally published in Dec 2016; video to photo grabber app was added to this guide in this update.