Macworld

iOS 27 includes lots of useful improvements and tweaks to the Camera and Photos experience, and several of them revolve around making it easier to organize and find your big library of images.

One of the ways Apple is taking care of a common issue is in producing still images from videos. Prior to iOS 27, you’d have to use a special application or just freeze your video at the right spot and take a screenshot. But screenshots of videos are fraught with problems. The resolution is lower; you’ll see on-screen interface elements; black bars are shown; the format is PNG instead of HEIF; and the metadata classifies the image as a screenshot instead of a photo.

With iOS 27, Apple lets you save any frame from a video in your Photos collection as a new image in just a few taps. Here’s how.

  1. In the Photos app, open one of your videos.
  2. Use the seek bar to advance to the part of the video you wish to save as an image, and pause.
  3. Tap the tree-dot (…) menu in the upper right.
  4. Select Save Video Frame as Photo.

Foundry

This also works in the edit menu, when you’re trimming the ends of your video, cropping it, or adjusting colors. Just choose the three-dot menu, as before.

Note that this new image will be in a normal photo format (HEIF or JPG, depending on your settings) rather than PNG like a screenshot. It will be the full resolution of your video. And it will inherit metadata from the original video, including date and location.

This means your new photo won’t appear at the bottom of your photo library with your most recent images. You’ll have to scroll back to the date of your video to find the image you created.