Photos is inconsistent when exporting image from video to pictures. It might work one time, and then not at all even after a restart. iMac M4 Tahoe 26.1, which is the latest. I pull up a video I took, click on Export frame to Pictures, and it works one time out of 20. This is some kind of weird bug that Apple needs to fix.
iMac 24″, macOS 26.1
Latest is 26.2-- but "latest" never carries much information, since it's always changing! My Mac is still in the old 26.1, though.
I do not get Export to Pictures to fail. (Many people have a hard time just finding that--congratulations!) It works every time for me-- I look in my Pictures folder, sort by Modified Date and I see a file named "Frame-15-12-2025-11-46-51.tiff" or some such thing.
What could we be doing differently?
You can
Start up your Mac in safe mode - Apple Support
to see if any of those can make a difference
Let us know…
Thanks, Richard Taylor, for the assurance that it is SUPPOSED to work. I did all those ideas, and they didn't help. Here's the aggravating part. I had an 8 yr old iMac on Ventura, and I had decided to upgrade to this new M4 iMac just to make this thing work consistently. I thought it surely must be that the software /hardware is too old. So I got a big, bad, beautiful blue iMac and i'm astonished that it isn't consistent.
FYI I need to make high quality images from our home videos to put into our yearbooks for the family . I can do a screen capture, but the resolution is far below what I need. When it works, I get a .tiff file that is 12 MB, a great quality image. My next thing is to contact Apple support directly, since I get support on this new iMac.
Photos inconsistently exports frame from video to pictures
