You know what they say about the Lord, right? ‘The Lord hath given, and the Lord hath taken away.’ Should we be surprised that Apple works the same way? They giveth, and they taketh away. Here’s an example that is near and dear to my wannabe videographer heart.

Apple once made it easy to grab a freeze frame photo from a video clip in iMovie. It was a handy way to snap a clean photo from a movie. A few years ago Apple removed that once beloved feature. Giveth. And Taketh away. With no thanks to Apple, here’s how to get it back. It’s fast, easy, and doesn’t cost much to get back what Apple once giveth for free.

Freeze. Frame. Photos.

Why would anyone want a photo from a video clip or movie? After all, the image resolution of most cameras these days far exceeds that of most video cameras, iPhone included. The answer is easy. Sometimes the photo we really want is more easily captured from within the video which grabs 30 images per second. The problem is getting a single photo from the video or movie clip. That’s made easy with SnapMotion, an inexpensive Mac app which does the deed. It captures a still photo from a moving video.

No, SnapMotion doesn’t do much, but what it does is well done. It can extract an image, commonly referred to as a freeze frame photo, from a video clip. Drop in the video, find the frame you want to capture, click and you’re done. Freeze frame photo captured.

The photo quality won’t be as high resolution as a photo taken by a digital camera, but it will be decent and with higher resolution video cameras, including the iPhone 6s Plus which takes 4k video, the quality of a freeze frame photo will surprise you.

SnapMotion has a few other items going for it, too. Batch processing. It can snap a freeze frame from a video every x-number of seconds. Images can be resized, too. And, there’s a feature to drop in a personalized watermark.

If you take videos and want to grab a photo of a specific frame in the video, SnapMotion does it in a, well, snap, but there are other options, too, including reorder individual snaps to create an animated GIF image, it can snap multiple frames which means you can select the frames and drag and drop to export to a folder. Plus, SnapMotion is a good Mac citizen and makes it easy to share photos and clips to others.

Even though SnapMotion is a Mac App Store app, where there are no try-before-you-buy trial versions, the developer has a trial version available so you can see what you get before you get it.