How to get YouTube thumbnail images in just 1 click

By João Ferreira Feb 3, 2021 Tools, YouTube 0 Comments

The other day while working in a solution to create a video gallery I had the necessity to get the thumbnail image of YouTube Videos. I had a look to the API but that required the use of an API key and the manual configuration of the user, after a while I found out that the images are publicly available for everyone to use in 5 different resolutions.

In this article you will find the generic URLs for each resolution and a small tool where you can paste the URL for your video and get the thumbnail and the URL for each image.

To get your thumbnail, you just need to replace the <video-id> by your video ID, you can get the it directly from the URL as highlighted in the following image.

• Default – https://img.youtube.com/vi/<video-id>/default.jpg
• HQ – https://img.youtube.com/vi/<video-id>/hqdefault.jpg
• MQ – https://img.youtube.com/vi/<video-id>/mqdefault.jpg
• SD – https://img.youtube.com/vi/<video-id>/sddefault.jpg
• Max Res– https://img.youtube.com/vi/<video-id>/maxresdefault.jpg

To make the process of getting the URL a bit easy you can paste the video URL in the text box below and click in the Get Thumbnail button.

Get YouTube video thumbnail image

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