Video Frame Extractor

How to use 4 steps

Choose your video under Video file.
Under Take, choose how frames are picked, and set From and To.
Pick the image Format, Quality and Size.
Press Extract Frames, then download single frames or all of them as a ZIP.

Video file

MP4 and WebM work everywhere, MOV usually. MKV, AVI and ProRes cannot be opened by a browser. Nothing is uploaded — the file is decoded on your device.

Extracted Frames

Loading the tool… 0 of 5 parts

Getting the tool ready. On a slow connection this can take a few seconds.

How this tool works

The video is played by your browser, each wanted frame is drawn onto a canvas, and the results are packed into a ZIP. Nothing is uploaded — the file is decoded on your own device, which is the main reason to use this rather than a service that wants the upload before it will do anything. You choose how often to take a frame, over what range, in which format and at what size.

Before extraction starts, the number of frames, the estimated size and the estimated time are calculated and shown. That is deliberate: both time and memory scale with the frame count rather than the length of the video, so a twenty-minute clip is comfortable at one frame per second and impossible at every frame. Being told before you commit is more useful than a tab that dies four minutes in.

What limits this and why

Fifteen hundred frames is the ceiling: the ZIP is assembled in memory, and that is roughly where a mid-range phone runs out. Twenty minutes at every frame would be around thirty-six thousand images and several gigabytes — a job for ffmpeg on a desktop, and the tool says so rather than letting you find out the hard way.
Only what your browser can play: MP4 and WebM everywhere, MOV usually. MKV, AVI and ProRes will not open at all. That is a limit of browser video support rather than a missing feature, and no setting works around it.
Frame-exactness varies between browsers: Chrome, Edge and Safari can capture frame by frame precisely. Firefox has no equivalent, so frames there are taken by seeking to a timestamp, and one may occasionally repeat or be skipped.
Keep the tab in front: browsers throttle background tabs heavily. Switching away mid-run does not lose the frames already captured, but extraction slows to a crawl until you come back.

Full guide

3 min read

Why frame count limits this tool, not video length

A twenty-minute video is comfortable at one frame a second and impossible at every frame, because time and memory scale with frames captured rather than minutes of footage. Why Firefox can occasionally repeat or skip a frame, and why JPEG beats PNG here almost every time.

Read the guide

Frequently Asked Questions

Specific to the Video Frame Extractor. Broader questions about this category are answered on the category page.

Why can I not extract every frame of a long video?

Twenty minutes at thirty frames a second is thirty-six thousand images and several gigabytes. The ZIP is built in memory, so the tab would run out long before finishing. One frame per second gives about twelve hundred, which is what most people wanting frames from a long video actually need.

How long does it take?

Roughly one to two minutes per thousand frames at 1080p, and longer for larger footage, since each frame is a seek plus an encode. The estimate shown before you start is calculated from your actual settings.

My file will not open. Why?

It is almost certainly MKV, AVI or ProRes, none of which browsers can decode. Converting to MP4 first will fix it. MP4 and WebM open everywhere.

Should I choose JPEG or PNG?

JPEG for video frames, almost always. PNG is lossless and roughly ten times larger, and video frames are already lossy from the original encode, so PNG preserves compression artefacts at great cost rather than adding quality.

What happens if I stop it halfway?

The frames already captured are packed into a ZIP and offered as normal. Stopping loses nothing that was finished, so a range you set wrongly costs you the waiting rather than the work.