If you’ve ever uploaded videos toYouTube, you’ve dealt with the annoyance of saving a still frame from that video to then use as your thumbnail. You don’t even have to be a content creator to get frustrated trying to grab a screenshot from a video without showing the volume slider, play/pause button, and other elements from the player controls. Thankfully, Google has been working on a feature to copy still frames from any online video with a new option in Chrome’s right-click menu. Back in October, we wrote thatGoogle was working on a “Save video frame” featurethat had to be turned on manually in Chrome Canary. Earlier this week, that tool was enabled by default.
First, we should go over some terms that most people generally don’t need to utilize. Chrome Canary is a developer-centric version of Google Chrome that gets nightly build updates, andit can be downloaded by anyone. It’s fairly unstable, as new elements and lines of code are being added and modified daily.Chromium is an open-source projectthat was created by and is still maintained by Google, but its code provides the building blocks of many web browsers, such as Microsoft Edge.
We originally learned about Chrome’s work on the “Save video frame” tool from@Leopeva64 on X (Twitter). Back in August,desktop Chrome made it easy to copy still frames in videos, but you still needed to then paste the copied frame into a file to save it. Interestingly, showcasing the connection that Chromium code reverberates throughout multiple web browsers, Microsoft Edge added the same “Copy” feature to its own stable version 116 that same month (viaWindows Latest).
The new “Save video frame” that was added later eliminates the need to paste the frame into a file. In the beginning, the functionality was hidden behind a server-side flag, but on December 15, anew change was added to the open-source Chromium codeto enable frame saving by default (via@Leopeva64). While the option has been there for a while, making it a default setting — at least in Canary — is a big step towards introducing it into a stable Chrome release.
This tool will be extremely helpful when it’s released in a stable version (likely Chrome 122, due out in February), but it’s not the only new thing that Google Chrome has in store for its users now or in the future. Thelatest stable version, Chrome 120, was released back in November, and it was thefirst version to start deprecating third-party cookies, among other things. Chrome 121’s beta showcases anexciting near-future with generative AI features, although we don’t exactly know what that’ll look like when public. you may follow along as wetrack what’s new in every version of Google Chrome.
Correction Aug 18, 2025:We’ve updated the story to clarify that the copy frame option remains available; the save frame option is an addition to it, not a replacement for it.
