How to download YouTube video thumbnails using PHP

April 5, 2018April 5, 2018 sameer php

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);

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