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iOS 27 gives Apple Photos a very useful feature I’ve wanted for years

Apple Photos gets a variety of exciting upgrades in iOS 27, including a new feature that’s long been on my wishlist: the ability to save a video frame as a photo.

iOS 27 lets you save video frame as a new photo, and it’s much better than screenshots

Have you ever wanted to turn a precious moment from a video into a photo? Historically, the only way to do that has been a screenshot.

But in iOS 27, there’s a much better solution coming: a new ‘Save Video Frame as Photo’ feature.

Taking a screenshot of a video is easy enough. But it comes with two downsides:

  1. Lower resolution photo
  2. Poorly cropped image

With iOS 27’s new feature, both of these become non-issues.

When watching a video in iOS 27’s Photos app, behind the three-dot icon in the top-right corner is a new menu option: ’Save Video Frame as Photo.’

It’s as simple as it sounds. The frame of the video that’s currently being displayed will be saved as a new photo to your Photos library.

The resolution will be far better than what a screenshot offers, and you won’t have to crop it at all. Instead, your iPhone will do all the work for you.

The iPhone has long supported snapping a still frame while you’re actively recording a video. So the lack of a similar option for saved videos has been a curious omission.

Thankfully now, with iOS 27, Apple finally lets you capture images from a saved video too.

Has this Photos feature been on your personal wishlist too? Let us know in the comments.

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Avatar for Ryan Christoffel Ryan Christoffel

Ryan got his start in journalism as an Editor at MacStories, where he worked for four years covering Apple news, writing app reviews, and more. For two years he co-hosted the Adapt podcast on Relay FM, which focused entirely on the iPad. As a result, it should come as no surprise that his favorite Apple device is the iPad Pro.