Grab high-res still pictures from movies and videos to insert into Office documents or emails.
We’ll show you how to capture or grab a proper, full size, high-resolution still image from a high quality video file then paste that picture into an Office document or Outlook email.
Why do this? Sometimes a video turns out badly but has some moments that would look good on their own. Or you don’t want to share an entire video but some images are easier to send around.
Microsoft Office users often want to insert images from video into Word documents, PowerPoint presentations or Outlook emails.
Many video editors and players have a ‘Snapshot’ function to grab a still image from a video. Unfortunately those features are limited to the screen size displayed as opposed to the true video size.
For example, if you take a still image from a 1920×1080 video using Windows Movie Maker you’ll get a much smaller image based on the preview pane size. Even VLC (the favored video player) will only grab a still image based on the current video window. That wasn’t a problem but these days recording a a high-resolution video is becoming quite common even in a modestly priced camera or smartphone.
ImageGrab
There are various special tools available to grab images at the full resolution (e.g. a 1920×1080 video gives 1920×1080 stills) regardless of the screen size. The one we like is ImageGrab
Download
Download and install the main program from here. When you start imageGrab it will check for the presence of two recommended utilities that are explained here. We chose to download the two utilities from the ImageGrab web site (option 3) and had no trouble using the program in Windows 11, 10 or 8.1.
To use, load in a video, play or use the slider until you find the point you want then press F5.
You can clearly see the video and still image resolutions which should be the same unless you’ve forced a change.
Alternatively press Ctrl + C which will put the still image into the clipboard. From the clipboard you can paste into Word, PowerPoint, Outlook or any other program without the hassle of saving and inserting from an image file.
There are settings to control where the pictures are saved, file format and file name. We suggest changing the default to high resolution JPG files (setting 100).
ImageGrab also has an Intervalometer which creates still images automatically every n seconds or frames. You can also overlay a video with text and there’s even a simple script language if you want to automate the process.
ImageGrab is free for personal use and the web site has plenty of instructions.
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