What to Do With Your Capture (YesVideo) Files

Who did your transfer (it's probably Capture)

Store photo counters don't digitize tapes themselves. They ship them to a lab. For more than twenty years, that lab was usually YesVideo, which now operates as Capture. As of this fall:

• Walmart— Walmart's own transfer page says every order from a Photo Center or its digitization website ships to Capture, formerly YesVideo. A digital download comes with the order; USB and DVD are add-ons.
• CVS — also fulfilled by Capture. Orders come on DVD or USB, each with a digital copy you can reach online.
• Costco— Costco's in-store Photo Center stopped doing transfers in early 2023. Its current tape transfer is listed on Costco Next and handled by Capture.
• Walgreens is different.Its home-movie transfers run through iMemories, not Capture. If that's you, our iMemories download guide is the right page.

Why it matters: your order emails, your login, and your cloud link all come from Capture, even if you never typed its name. If you're hunting for "the Walmart download link" and can't find it, search your inbox for Capture and YesVideo.

Step 1: Download everything before the cloud window closes

Capture's site says every order includes 90 days of free cloud access to stream or download your files. That window is the most time-sensitive thing in this guide. Streaming a tape once from the cloud is not the same as owning it. Get a copy onto your own computer:

1. Make one folder somewhere permanent, such as Family Tapes — 2026 transfer in your Documents or Movies folder.
2. Sign in to your Capture account from a computer, not a phone. Phones fill up fast with full-length video.
3. Download every video into that folder. A two-hour tape is a multi-gigabyte file, so use home Wi-Fi and let each finish.
4. Open each downloaded file and skip to the end. A file that plays to the last minute downloaded whole.

If you also bought the USB drive, copy it into the same folder anyway. The stick is how the files got to you, not where they should live. Our file-size guide helps you size the drive you'll need.

Step 2: Make two more copies

Once the folder is on your computer, copy it twice more: once to an external hard drive, and once to a cloud service you control and pay for yourself, such as Google Photos, iCloud, Dropbox, or Backblaze. Three copies, in at least two places, means a dead laptop or a house fire doesn't take the tapes with it.

Capture's cloud doesn't count as one of the three, because you don't control how long it stays. Our backup guide covers which settings keep the video from being shrunk on upload.

Step 3: The Google Photos date problem

Capture offers to sync your transferred files straight into Google Photos. That's convenient, but watch what happens next. Photo apps sort videos by the date stored inside the file, and a transferred file usually carries the date it was made at the lab. So your 1991 birthday tape tends to land in this year, next to last week's grocery photos, as one long video.

You can change a video's date by hand in Google Photos or Apple Photos, but one tape usually spans several years, so a single date is wrong for most of it. The real fix is to split first and date each piece. Our guide to fixing dates on digitized videos shows both the by-hand way and the faster way.

Step 4: Turn each long tape into clips

Open any file and you'll see the core issue: the transfer recorded each tape as it played, start to finish. One file holds a Christmas, a Little League game, a stretch of static, and a birthday two years later. Nobody sits through that, and you can't text your brother "the part where Dad falls in the pool" when it's 52 minutes in.

The fix is to cut each tape into one clip per event and give each clip its date. You can do it free in iMovie (Mac) or Clipchamp (Windows): scrub through, mark each cut, export each piece. Plan on roughly an hour per tape. Our splitting guide walks through it.

Once each moment is its own dated clip, everything else gets easy: clips land in the right year in your photo library, fit in a family group text, and play on the TV without hunting through a two-hour file.

If your order came back on DVD

DVDs are the weakest of the three formats to keep. Discs scratch, many new computers have no disc drive, and a home-movie DVD doesn't hold a normal video file — it holds a VIDEO_TS folder of .VOB files. If the cloud download is still open, use that instead.

If DVDs are all you have, copy each disc's VIDEO_TS folder to your computer with a USB DVD drive, then convert it to MP4 with the free HandBrake app. Our DVD transfer guide covers each step, and our file-won't-play guide helps if a .VOB won't open.

Frequently Asked Questions