For every video uploaded on YouTube, there are multiple thumbnails created for it. If you ever tried uploading your own video, you might have noticed that you can select one out of the three thumbnails that it generates. You can also upload your own but it is a different story. This post is about accessing those auto-generated YouTube videos publicly.
Due to different reasons, there may arise a need where you require to save, access or download thumbnails that YouTube generates for all its videos. You might have to link to a YouTube video from your website using the image or you might need the thumbnail to share on other websites.
You can generate those thumbnails manually by taking a screenshot of the video. That way is convenient but the smarter way is to get automatically generated YouTube thumbnails. YouTube auto generates a set of thumbnails of different sizes and quality for your convenience. The thumbnails are generated for each and every video hosted at YouTube. The best part of it is that it is available publicly.
How to Get the Thumbnails?
For our example we will be using the most popular video on YouTube i.e. Gangnam Style. The video is available at the url:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bZkp7q19f0
You will have to get the video id of the video. For this particular video, the id is 9bZkp7q19f0. The id is present after the v= part of any YouTube video.
Getting Default thumbnail
This is the smallest possible thumbnail (120 px X 90 px) used by YouTube as well. The thumbnail is present at the following url:
http://img.youtube.com/vi/9bZkp7q19f0/default.jpg
The thumbnail generated:
Getting Small Thumbnails
YouTube generates four small thumbnails for each video. The four screenshots are from different positions in the video. Here is the list of those four screenshots for Gangnam Style:
http://img.youtube.com/vi/9bZkp7q19f0/0.jpg
http://img.youtube.com/vi/9bZkp7q19f0/1.jpg
http://img.youtube.com/vi/9bZkp7q19f0/2.jpg
http://img.youtube.com/vi/9bZkp7q19f0/3.jpg
Getting Medium Quality Thumbnail
The medium quality thumbnails are of size 320 px X 180 px and is available at the following url:
http://img.youtube.com/vi/9bZkp7q19f0/mqdefault.jpg
Getting High Quality Thumbnail
If you need a higher quality thumbnail i.e. 480 px X 360 px thumbnail then access it via the following url:
http://img.youtube.com/vi/9bZkp7q19f0/hqdefault.jpg
Maximum Resolution Thumbnail
Finally, if you need the largest possible thumbnail of a video i.e. equal to the largest possible size of the video 1080p, 720p etc. then you can get it by:
http://img.youtube.com/vi/9bZkp7q19f0/maxresdefault.jpg
*The maximum resolution thumbnail for the video in our example is 1920 px X 1080 px.
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