[GUIDE] How to get thumbnails from a YouTube video

by Aditya Nath Jha January 3, 2015, 8:06 pm 499 Views

YouTube is the world’s most used video website. The average person who uses internet visits YouTube at least once in his normal browsing session. It has a wide variety of content to suit every person’s needs. Often we need to use YouTube videos in our own projects by embedding them, sharing them or including them in our own posts and projects. Often it happens to us that we need a high quality thumbnail for the YouTube video we have and it becomes a daunting task to make a thumbnail manually by either taking a screenshot while the video is playing or through some other method. So what if there was a easy way to get thumbnails from YouTube videos? Worry not folks today we at Inspire2rise will tell you how to get thumbnails from a YouTube video the easy way!

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How to get thumbnails from a YouTube video: Understand the basics.

YouTube stores all of its thumbnails for a video on a specific URL structure. The thumbnail URL structure for any YouTube video is as given below.

To get normal thumbnails of the video i.e. low resolution thumbnails.
http://i.ytimg.com/vi/ID of YouTube video/1.jpg
http://i.ytimg.com/vi/ID of YouTube video/2.jpg
http://i.ytimg.com/vi/ID of YouTube video/3.jpg
Use any of the above URLs to get the different thumbnails of the video in question.
For medium sized thumbnails of the selected YouTube video.
http://i.ytimg.com/vi/ID of YouTube video/0.jpg
For high resolution thumbnails of the selected YouTube video.
http://img.youtube.com/vi/ID of YouTube video/hqdefault.jpg
For maximum resolution thumbnails of the selected YouTube video.
http://img.youtube.com/vi/ID of YouTube video/maxresdefault.jpg

As you can see in all of the above URL structures there’s a need to input the video ID of the YouTube video. You can find it simply by inspecting the URL of any YouTube video. The parameter v has a value in the URL and that is the video id.

So that was all you needed to know about how to get thumbnails from a YouTube video. If you have any doubts or want to say something then do comment here, we will solve your issues.

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Written by Aditya Nath Jha

Aditya Nath Jha is an Engineer from New Delhi, India. His areas of interest include Gadgets, WordPress, speed optimization & latest technology.
When he is not busy blogging he loves to write poetry, compose his own songs and has a taste for music! Find me on Facebook, Google +, Twitter, Linked in.
And watch my videos on Youtube.