I’m backing up my photos from a trip to my computer and have just discovered how frustratingly difficult it seems to be to use a computer to make my selection of a single still from the image sequences the Pixel sometimes takes (forget what it calls them).

I know you can you use the photos app but I want to use my computer (a mac). Preview just considers them stills, so it essentially picks one for me (I assume it’s the last still in the sequence), that’s usually what I want but they take up more space and if I can’t choose a different still then it defeats the purpose.

EDIT: As it turns out, Top shot (the Google name for these ‘image sequences’ I was referring to), doesn’t do what I thought it did. I thought it was just fancy burst mode where the shots in the burst are treated as one file on storage, and where the decision to use burst or not is automated with clever ‘AI’. That’s not totally wrong except that it isn’t an ‘image’ sequence in the sense that I know it. It records a video and a still when you take a top shot. I’m not exactly sure, but I think basically the last frame is a still and everything you see before is a ‘video’. The distinction here is that the video is a video in the sense that it isn’t comprised of still images in common stills formats nor at the resolution and other capabilities of the pixel’s still cameras. The video is a video file recorded in a video format, using a video codec, at a lower resolution, minus HDR and with the compression techniques of video leading basically to just drastically lower quality images. In essence if you use the photos app as intended to select a still from the sequence recorded as a top shot, you can select between 1 photo of the best available quality (depending on your stills settings) and multiple useless video stills of poor quality. This explains why all the posts I found whilst researching my query were from people who wanted to extract a video and a still, which I thought was odd because surely you would want the constituent stills comprising the video with which you could do whatever you wanted including making a video from them for some reason if it floats your boat. Now I realise it’s because there is only a video and a still inside the ‘MP.jpg’ files and they just want to split those 2 elements apart, in fact I think a lot of those asking were trying to split them apart so they could delete the useless video and save space. Not thrilled to learn this. Definitely switching off top shot from now on as it is both useless in almost ever scenario, but also, due to the automated nature of when its used, taking up greatly increased storage space whilst delivering so much less benefit than I had presumed. Icing on the cake, Google apparently introduced this top shot feature some time ago and replaced an existing burst mode that actually worked as one would expect so now I can’t invoke an actually useful burst mode on demand when I want it as one would have done in the past because the function… doesn’t exist anymore, great!