How To: Auto-Extract Only the Best Photo Stills from Your iPhone Videos

Videos are great for catching fleeting moments, and photos are insanely easy to share with anyone, but how can you get the best of both worlds?

Apple includes an easy way to take snapshots while you're in the middle of recording video, but that's just too much work for me. I'd rather focus on getting the perfect angle and lighting, and when you start multitasking, the video ends up looking pretty bad, and therefore so do the pictures.

The solution? Vhoto, a new iOS app that intelligently pulls still images from videos in your Camera Roll using proprietary software. Whether it's a video of a live sports play, your favorite band onstage, or your friends pulling a prank, you can be sure that Vhoto will find a great picture for you.

Step 1: Set Up Vhoto

After installing Vhoto on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, sign up by using an email and password or through a third-party like Twitter. Once you're in, you'll be taken the camera viewfinder.

At the top of the viewfinder, you'll see several icons. Starting from left to right, there's social, night mode, switch camera, flash toggle, and gallery. Go into the gallery to look through your videos.

Step 2: Select a Video

Once you find a suitable video, Vhoto will begin processing it and pulling pictures based on several components, such as blur, contrast, faces, smiles, user intent, and a feature that it calls "Novelty detector", which finds stills that are vastly different from the rest.

Step 3: Save Your Favorite Stills

A list of generated pictures will now appear on your screen—comb through them to find your favorite one. In the editing stage, you can mess with filters and editing tools, then save the picture to your Camera Roll.

Step 4: Shoot Videos with Vhoto (Optional)

If you shoot videos directly through the Vhoto camera, you'll notice white circles that follow people's faces in the shot.

These white circles assist Vhoto in recognizing faces (whether it's the front or rear camera) and making better choices for stills to pull from the videos.

As you use Vhoto more and more, it will begin to recognize user patterns and utilize them to provide better pictures.

Step 5: Share Your Stills (Optional)

As is commonplace with the majority of apps, Vhoto has social networking. In addition to sharing stills through Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, you can post pictures on Vhoto's built-in social network using a caption and hashtags.

Exploring, you'll find pictures from local and popular users, as well as photos organized by hashtags.

While Vhoto is a free application, be on the look out for in-app purchases in the future that will allow users to archive and search for video content.