Abstract: A key frame representative of a sequence of frames in a video file is selected by applying face detection to a video to select a key frame which may include people and has particular application to indexing video files located by a search engine web crawler. A key frame, one frame representative of a video file, is extracted from the sequence of frames. The sequence of frames may include multiple scenes or shots, for example, continuous motions relative to a camera separated by transitions, cuts, fades and dissolves. To extract a key frame face detection is performed in each frame and a key frame is selected from the sequence of frames based on a sum of detected faces in the frame.