How to get thumbnail of youtube video from youtube API

Question

Hello,

If i'm having URL of any Youtube video is there any way to use PHP and cURL to get the associated thumbnail from the YouTube API?

Answer 1

Hii @kartik,

If you want the biggest image from YouTube for a specific video ID, then the URL should be something like this:

http://i3.ytimg.com/vi/SomeVideoIDHere/0.jpg

if you want to get rid of the "black bars" and do it like YouTube does it, you can use:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi_webp/<video id>/mqdefault.webp

And if you can't use the .webp file extension you can do it like this:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/<video id>/mqdefault.jpg

Also, if you need the unscaled version, use maxresdefault instead of mqdefault.

Hope this is helpful!
ThankYOU!!