Video Frame Grabber

Video Frame Grabber — runs in your browser

Everything below happens on this page. No file is uploaded, there is no account, and nothing is watermarked.

Drop a video here, or click to choose

Time

0.0s

Even sample 4 frames 8 frames 12 frames 24 frames

Grab this frame Grab N frames evenly Download frames as ZIP

Arrow keys step 1 second. Seeking lands on the nearest keyframe, so verify a frame before relying on it.

This finds the exact frames you want. Rather than accepting whatever the editor offers, you scrub a timeline, drop markers where a shot starts or a subtitle changes, and export precisely those moments as still images.

It is built on two things every browser already ships: a video element that decodes the file, and a canvas that can read any frame back out as a bitmap. Your video is read from disk into the tab and never sent anywhere, which means it works on files too large to upload and on footage you would not want a third party holding.

What it does

Everything is done on your device, so there is nothing to upload and nothing to wait for a queue.

How to use it

Four steps, and none of them leaves your machine.

1. Open a video

   MP4, MOV, WebM or MKV, provided your browser can decode the codec inside it.

2. Scrub to the frame you want

   Use the slider or the arrow keys, which move one second at a time.

3. Mark and export

   Each marked timestamp becomes a still image at source resolution.

4. Download

   One by one, or the whole set as a zip.

What people use it for

The jobs this actually gets used for.

Why extract frames instead of opening an editor

For a single still, a video editor is a 2 GB application doing one small job.

Every browser can already decode the video formats people actually deliver — H.264 in MP4, VP9 in WebM, and in Safari, HEVC in MOV. A video element will play them, and a canvas will hand back any single frame as an image. There is no codec to bundle and no transcoding step, which means the whole tool is a few dozen lines of code.

That matters mostly for large files. A 4K clip twenty minutes long is several gigabytes. Uploading it anywhere costs real time and hands a copy of your footage to somebody else. Reading it from disk costs nothing, because it never moves.

The honest limitation is that this only reads formats the browser can decode. A ProRes master or an unusual codec will not play, and no amount of JavaScript fixes that — the decoder does not exist in the browser. If the file will not load, that is the reason, and converting it locally is the fix.

What it cannot do

The honest list, so you do not find out halfway through a batch.

• Only formats the browser can decode. ProRes, DNxHD and most editing codecs will not load.
• Frame-accurate seeking is approximate. Browsers seek to the nearest keyframe, so a marked timestamp can be off by up to a second. Step frame by frame to verify.
• A very long video in a very high resolution can exhaust tab memory. Work in sections for long 4K files.
• No audio. This extracts stills only.

Built on open source

The processing is done by a published, licensed library — you can read exactly what runs on your device.

This page uses HTMLVideoElement + Canvas (web standard) (W3C / WHATWG), released under Web standard. It runs entirely in the browser tab, which is why your files never leave the machine: there is no server to send them to. Nothing here calls an API, and there is no account to create.

Related guides

Longer reads on the same workflow, from the OpenFilmo blog.

Other free browser tools

Same principle: they run on your device and cost nothing to use.

Frequently asked questions