Handy Tip - Photos from your GoPro

Recently I was on a fishing expedition with Graham Knight of G&T Fishing School and Charters. It wasn't a particularly successful day and I hadn't taken many photos. When I sat down to write a short article from the trip I began regretting not taking the camera out and snapping more photos. But while I was cutting together some video it struck me that I could capture some still images from the video that was shot. The GoPro's had been running for most of the day, so there was plenty of footage to pick from. And with today video cameras shooting at 720p or 1080p, the resolution of images extracted are fine for web use.

So here is a quick tutorial on how you can get photos from your GoPro or other video footage. Completely free and easy to do!

I use Adobe Premiere CC to cut together all my video footage, and it does have a button to click that captures jpeg images from the video. But to keep it free and easy, download a program called VLC. This is a media play that you should be using to play video anyway! It runs on both Windows and Mac, and will playback almost any video file without the need for additional codecs.

With VLC loaded open you video footage you want to use. Play or use the progress bar to scrub through to where you want the image taken from. Pause the video on the exact section. From the menu bar select 'video' and then 'snapshot'. This will save a png image to your photos folder. You can then load and edit the image just like any other photo! Too easy :)

Photo's taken from 720p footage will be at a resolution of 1280 x 720. This is only about 1MP is size, but is fine for Facebook or the web. 1080p will be slightly better at 1920 x 1080, or about 2.2MP. One point to note is that these resolutions have a 16:9 aspect ratio, which is fine if you like it. But you may want to crop back to 4:3 for a more standard photo aspect ratio.

The following sample images were all taken from my GoPro recording at 720p. Some are cropped to 4:3 while others are still in the original 16:9 aspect ratio. I should also note that these sample photos have been further reduced in resolution for upload and display here. All my photos used on this site have a maximum resolution of 800px in any one dimension. The reduces file size and increased load time for readers. But I am sure you will agree that they are perfectly ok for online viewing.