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I had Live photo enabled on my iPhone 6 and have taken over a thousand photos. When I attempted to import them to my MacBook, they all showed up as 3 second .m4v files.

Converting over a thousand live photos one by one in iPhone was just too tedious...SO...I downloaded the Lean application to batch convert all the live photos to .jpgs.

BECAUSE it was such a large batch, somehow, Lean was choking on the conversion so it asked me more than once if I wanted to delete the 1000+ extra duplicate images that it extracted from the 3 second .m4v files.

I clicked yes each time, and discover it deleted entire sets of images completely.

Fortunately, I had imported all the Live photos to iPhoto, so they all exist on my Macbook as .m4v.

Video conversion software that converts .m4v to .mp4 abounds, however...

Is there ANY WAY to batch export all the .m4v 3 second videos to still .jpgs in MacBook?

Ideally without having to buy 3rd party software?

iPhoto export does not seem to let me export the .m4v files to .jpg, it wants to export them as video files.

Can someone help me out? Thanks in advance!

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  • How do I convert just one? – jtheletter Jul 5 at 3:43
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I see two possible options for you: Using the Photos app or Image Capture.

Photos app

The newer Photos app (that replaces iPhoto) was released as part of the OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 update. As you seem to be running Mac OS X Yosemite, presumably you have it installed on your system (by default in the Applications folder).

If you import your live photos into the Photos app and then select them (not sure I would select all 1000+ at once), you can go to File > Export and it will export the JPEG versions of the selected photos.

As an aside, if you Option-drag an image into the Finder or go to File > Export > Export Unmodified Original, then both the unmodified JPEG and the associated MOV files are exported.

Image Capture

Another possibility is to just use Image Capture (also by default in the Applications folder):

  • Launch Image Capture
  • Connect your iPhone via USB
  • Select your iPhone
  • Choose Live Photos images
  • Import the images

Both the JPEG and MOV files for each image should copy across to your MacBook.

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