Real frames, not screenshots
Pressing Print Screen while a video plays gives you whatever the player happens to show: scaled to your window, sometimes blurred by motion between two frames, often with controls drawn on top. This tool works differently. It reads the video file itself and decodes the exact frame you picked at the video's native resolution, so a 1080p clip gives 1920×1080 stills and a 4K clip gives 3840×2160.
Phone videos recorded in portrait are handled correctly too: the rotation stored in the file is applied, so your stills come out upright.
Moving one frame at a time
A second of video usually holds 24, 30 or 60 separate pictures, and the one you want is often between two that look almost the same, a blink, a mid-jump pose, a perfectly timed reaction. Pause near the moment, then use the arrow keys or the arrow buttons to step forward and back one frame at a time. The counter under the player shows the exact timestamp and frame number, so you always know where you are.
Shift + arrow jumps a whole second, which is quicker for getting into the right neighbourhood first.
Which image format should I pick?
- PNG keeps every pixel exactly as decoded. Choose it when you'll edit the image afterwards, or for screen recordings with sharp text. Files are the largest.
- JPG is the most compatible choice for sharing and uploading. At 90% quality or above it's very hard to tell apart from PNG, at a fraction of the size.
- WebP looks like JPG at roughly two-thirds of the size, and every current browser and most apps open it. Great for websites.
Keep in mind that a frame can never be sharper than the video it came from. Compressed videos, especially ones downloaded from social media, show their compression most in fast motion, so a calmer moment often makes a cleaner still.
Grabbing many frames at once
Grab automatically has two modes. Every few seconds is ideal for storyboards, reviewing long recordings or collecting reference shots. Evenly spaced splits the video into equal parts and takes the middle frame of each, a quick way to collect frames for a contact sheet or find a cover image without scrubbing through the whole thing.
Every frame lands in the gallery with its timestamp. Click one to jump back to it in the player, remove the ones you don't need, and download the rest as a single ZIP. File names include the timestamp, like clip_00-01-23.450.png, so they sort in order.
Turning a frame into a thumbnail
A sharp, expressive frame from your own footage is often the best start for a video thumbnail. Select a frame in the gallery and send it straight to Thumbnail Preview to see how it looks next to real YouTube results, or to the Social Image Resizer to crop it for Instagram, X or LinkedIn. Want motion instead of a still? Make a GIF from the same clip.