The following post shows how you can retrieve any YouTube video thumbnails in PHP without using the YouTube api. I needed this for a onetime solution to get some thumbnails for a few videos and using the api seemed a little time consuming. So here goes.
YouTube video thumbnail structure
The urls from where you can get the thumbnails are shown below. Each video generates around 4 standard thumbnails. The first image is a full size image while others are smaller thumbnail images. You can easily try the following urls in the browser by replacing the ‘youtube-video-id’ part with the corresponding videos id.
http://img.youtube.com/vi/youtube-video-id/0.jpg http://img.youtube.com/vi/youtube-video-id/1.jpg http://img.youtube.com/vi/youtube-video-id/2.jpg http://img.youtube.com/vi/youtube-video-id/3.jpg # Default thumbnail http://img.youtube.com/vi/youtube-video-id/default.jpg |
The id is the last part of the YouTube url or the id in the ‘v’ GET variable.
# Example, the id here is 'VSB4wGIdDwo' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSB4wGIdDwo |
Other than the above mentioned urls there are a few specific ones listed below which are also available.
Standard quality version: http://img.youtube.com/vi/youtube-video-id/sddefault.jpg Medium quality version: http://img.youtube.com/vi/youtube-video-id/mqdefault.jpg High quality version: http://img.youtube.com/vi/youtube-video-id/hqdefault.jpg Maximum quality version: http://img.youtube.com/vi/youtube-video-id/maxresdefault.jpg |
Note: Not all image types may be available for a video.
Getting images using PHP
Below is the PHP code to download thumbnails when given the video id.
<?php // Set YouTube video id here $video_id = 'VSB4wGIdDwo'; // Set path where to store thumbnails, // Set this to a blank string to save in the current direcrory. $path_to_save_thumbnails = 'E:/localhost/test/youtube-thumbs/'; // Nothing to change below this $ch = curl_init(); // Thumbnail types $thubnail_types = array('0', '1', '2', '3','default', 'sddefault', 'mqdefault', 'hqdefault', 'maxresdefault'); foreach($thubnail_types as $type) { $youtube_thumb_url = 'http://img.youtube.com/vi/'.$video_id.'/'.$type.'.jpg'; echo "Downloading thumbnail [$type]." . PHP_EOL; // set URL and other appropriate options curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $youtube_thumb_url); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); $image = curl_exec($ch); $info = curl_getinfo($ch); // If image is found than save it to a file. if($info['http_code'] == 200) { // Store thumbnails in the given directory, change this // to your liking. file_put_contents($path_to_save_thumbnails.$type.'.jpg', $image); } } echo 'Done downloading.'; // close cURL resource, and free up system resources curl_close($ch); |
Thanks for the tip: nice to be able to get those images.
If you know the URL you can use $image = file_get_contents($youtube_thumb_url); instead of CURL.
If the URL is not valid/reachable, PHP issues a warning and $image is bool(false).