How To Get Thumbnails from Youtube Videos

To retrieve thumbnail images from a YouTube video, you must first retrieve the video ID, for example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmVAmlpbnD4, https://youtu.be/dmVAmlpbnD4, https://www.youtube.com/embed/dmVAmlpbnD4

All these examples point to the same video, the ID of the video in these examples is dmVAmlpbnD4. Simply replace ID in the following URLs with the identifier of your Youtube video.

First image extracted from the video and image by default.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ID/0.jpg, 480 x 360 px, jpg.

Second image taken from the video.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ID/1.jpg, 120 x 90 px, jpg.

Third image taken from the video.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ID/2.jpg, 120 x 90 px, jpg.

Fourth image taken from the video.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ID/3.jpg, 120 x 90 px, jpg.

Thumbnail low resolution, the same as 0.jpg.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ID/default.jpg, 120 x 90 px, jpg.

Thumbnail in medium resolutionlow, the same as 0.jpg.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ID/mqdefault.jpg, 320 x 180 px, jpg.

Thumbnail in medium resolutionhigh, the same as 0.jpg.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ID/hqdefault.jpg, 480 x 360 px, jpg.

Thumbnail in medium-high resolution, the same as 0.jpg.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ID/sddefault.jpg, 640 x 480 px, jpg.

Thumbnail in high resolution, the same as 0.jpg.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ID/maxresdefault.jpg, variable size (1920 x 1080 px / 1280 x 720 px ...), jpg.