Often yes, and the method splits on one fact: whether the video is public or your own team's. For a public video, running a reverse image search on the frame works more often than people expect, especially if the frame has something distinctive in it. For footage inside your own archive, an image is a weak query for almost every system you already own, and the reliable path is to turn the frame back into words and search those instead.
Start by reading the frame
Before searching anything, look at what is actually in the picture. Text on screen, a lower third with a name in it, a logo on a wall, a product package, the interface of an app being demonstrated, a date visible somewhere, even the clothes. Any one of those is a stronger search term than the image itself, because text search engines are far better at text than image matchers are at video frames.
This step takes a minute and solves a fair share of cases outright. A visible chyron with a name plus two words about the topic will usually find a public clip. A visible product in a shot you know your team filmed narrows the archive down to a campaign.
If the video is public: search the frame itself
Reverse image search on a still is the standard move. It works when the frame is close to a thumbnail somebody else published, or when the same still has been reposted, which is common for anything that circulated widely.
Two things make it work better. Choose a frame with a distinctive composition rather than a dark or motion-blurred one, and crop out player controls, subtitles, and platform overlays before uploading, because those confuse the match. If the first frame fails, take a different one from a few seconds away. Matching is sensitive to which moment you grabbed in ways that feel arbitrary from the outside.
The honest limit: if the clip never circulated as a still and the video itself is not indexed by whatever you are searching with, reverse image search will find nothing and no amount of retrying changes that.
If it is your own footage, work backwards from where the screenshot came from
Screenshots usually arrive with a trail. Somebody sent it from a published post, a client deck, or a Slack thread. The trail is often faster than any search.
If it came from something published, the publish date points at a campaign, the campaign points at an edit project, and the edit project points at the source rushes. If it came from a colleague, ask them where they got it before doing anything else. And if it came from an old export sitting in a shared drive, the file's modification date will usually bracket the shoot within a couple of weeks. Working backwards from a published piece to its source follows this trail in more detail.
Turning the frame into a query your archive can answer
If the frame is from material your team owns and the trail has gone cold, the question becomes whether anything in your setup knows what is inside the footage. In most archives it does not. Filenames and folders describe where a file came from, not what happens in it, so a screenshot has nothing to match against. Whether automatic tagging closes that gap depends heavily on whether the tags it produces use your words for your own products.
The other approach is to describe the frame in plain language and search on the description. Vivu answers that kind of description with the timestamp where it happens and the context around it, so a frame from a shoot two years ago becomes a query rather than an afternoon of scrubbing, as long as the footage from that shoot has been uploaded to the project you are searching.
When you do not need any of this
If three people were on that shoot and one of them is online, ask. A screenshot identification problem is often a memory problem, and human memory for footage is very good for about eighteen months. The same applies if what you actually need is a similar shot rather than that exact one, in which case the search you want is for the subject, not the frame.
It is also worth asking why you need the source. If you need the master to re-cut, keep going. If you only need a higher resolution still, the published version may already be enough.
How to tell which situation you are in
Two questions settle it. Did somebody outside your organisation make this, and has it circulated? If yes, work on the image and its visible details, and expect a result in minutes or not at all. If it is yours, stop searching the image and start searching your own trail, because the frame is the weakest handle you have on your own archive and the publish date is the strongest.
FAQ
Does reverse image search work on a frame from a video?
It works when that exact frame, or something visually close to it, exists somewhere as a still. Thumbnails, press images, and screenshots people have already posted are what get matched. A random frame from the middle of a video that nobody ever screenshotted is much less likely to return anything, so try several frames from different moments before concluding the video is not findable.
What if the screenshot is blurry or is a photo of a screen?
Crop tightly to the most distinctive object in the frame and search that instead of the whole image. Photos of screens carry moire patterns and glare that break visual matching, so the readable details matter more than the picture. Any text you can make out, even partially, is worth typing into a normal search along with two or three words describing the scene.
Can I search my company's video library using an image instead of text?
Most systems in place today expect text, so the practical route is to describe the frame rather than upload it. Write down what is happening, what is visible, and anything that was probably said around that moment, then search on that. Whether it returns anything depends on whether your library indexes the content of the footage or only its filenames and fields.
How do I find which project file a published video came from?
Start from the publish date rather than the file. Look for the edit project created in the weeks before it, and if your team keeps exports next to their projects, match the duration of the published cut against the exports you find. If several candidates survive, open the last few seconds of each, since end cards and outros differ between versions more reliably than the openings do.