Aspects of the present disclosure involve a system comprising a medium storing a program and method for machine-learning based selection of a representative video frame. The program and method provide for receiving a set of video frames; determining a first subset of frames by removing frames outside of an image quality threshold; determining a second subset by removing frames outside of an image stillness threshold; computing feature data for each frame in the second subset; providing, for each frame in the second subset, the feature data to a machine learning model (MLM), the MLM being configured to output a score for each frame in the second subset of frames based on the feature data, the MLM having been trained with a first set of images labeled based on aesthetics, and with a second set of images labeled based on image quality; and selecting a frame based on output scores.