Both Windows and Mac OS have the built-in app to help their users extract photos from videos. On Mac, we can use QuickTime player to export video frames. If you are a Windows user and have upgraded to the latest Windows 11, you can follow these quick steps to extract a still image from video using Windows Photos app which is pre-installed in the OS. No need to download a third-party video or photo editor for this task.
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You may have been told to right click on the video once opened in the Microsoft Photos app and go to Edit & Create menu, then Save Photos. However if your OS is up-to-date, you won’t be able to find this Edit & Create menu any more. There has been a change in how you save still pictures from videos in Windows Photos app. With Microsoft Photos app version 2022.31070.26005.0 (could be the latest version as of Sep 2022), you can find the same capability following these steps.
Export video frames in Windows 11
Firstly, open Windows File Explorer to locate the video or movie, then right click on it and choose to open it in Photos app.
If you double click on it, most likely it will be opened in the Movies & TV app which is the default video player in Windows 11. Although we can eventually choose to open the video in Photos app within the Movies & TV app.
Once the video is opened in Microsoft Photos app, play the video, pause until you see the frame that you need to extract. You should see the More Options (three dots icon …) at the end of the play control bar. Click on it to expand the menu and choose Save a frame from the pop-up menu. You will then be taken to the Save Photo dialog where you can preview the selected frame, click the previous or next button to choose adjacent frames, or drag the slider or play head to browse through the video frames and quickly select any frame from the video you desire. Finally hit the Save a photo button in the upper right corner to save the video frame to the same folder as your source video. Note that the exported video frames will be save to the same folder as the video, it may not be in the Pictures folder.
Grab stills through screen capture
You can take a screenshot to save anything displays on your computer screen as still image. This is by far the simplest way to extract frames from a video. Here is how you can do it on Windows 11 PC.
Note that depending on your display resolution, the screenshot quality may suffer. Generally speaking, the higher the display resolution, the better the screenshots you can capture.
On your Windows computer, you can use the built-in app, the Snipping Tool, from Microsoft to quickly capture screen. Press on the print screen see if you can bring up this tool on your PC. The print screen key could be represented by various letters on different computers, such as Print Scrn, Prnt Scrn, Prt Scrn, Prt Scn, Prt Scr, Pr Sc or PrtSc. Alternatively you can press the Windows+Shift+S key combination to quickly start a snip. The keyboard shortcut gives you a choice to take a screenshot using a rectangular selection, freehand selection, full window, or full-screen capture.
You can play the video in full screen with your preferred video player and pause it at the frame you want to capture. Then start the Snipping tool to capture the full screen and thus get screenshot with the highest resolution.