Clips app on iPad: How do you export a single clip from a project?

Question

I ran into a frustrating problem at my parent's house over the holiday weekend. My brother has Down Syndrome, and spends most of the day using his iPad. He uses Clips to make little videos. They are just local to the iPad -- he never publishes them, and in fact does not have any social media, e-mail, or other accounts at all. This is probably key to my question.

He has a Clips project with about a dozen clips, and we wanted to move one clip to another family member's iPhone. To be clear, we didn't want to export/publish/send the project, just the one clip in the project. As best as I could tell, this action is impossible or at least very well hidden. Here's what I ran into:

1. When you select a clip, the export button disappears. That leads me to believe that you can only export the entire project.
2. You can "favorite" a clip, but that also does not seem to offer any new export options.
3. Any attempt to export the entire project seemed to require an account of some kind (YouTube, iMessage, etc.), which for privacy reasons we don't want to set up on that iPad. I just want to move the file between machines, locally.
4. I would have tried the method in #3, but when connecting the iPad to the MacBook, I ran into yet another probably unrelated problem in that, even though the iPad is fully set up, registered with iCloud, and has been used for weeks, iTunes only offered to Restore or Set Up as New iPad when I plugged it in. This led me to believe that either option would have erased everything.

So in short, how do I export/move a clip (not a project) from Clips to another iPhone (or to an iPhone indirectly via our MacBook), without deleting the rest of the clips in the project, or creating some kind of account on the iPad?

Answer 1

I'm using Apple Clips version 1.1 - you can save individual clips to the Photo Library on your iPad. From there you can AirDrop it or share it in another way.

1. Select the clip
2. Save to Photo Library
3. Share from the Photos app

Answer 2

I’ve run into this too and so I know it’s frustrating. I’m going to try the answer recommended https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/297512/160704 but another alternative is to duplicate the entire project, remove all the clips you don’t want to export and then download the project, which at this point will just consist of the single clip. Will let you know if I find any other ways to do this.