For some reason, I found myself needing my YouTube thumbnail images for stuff…

Blog post featured images, putting together mini products or lead magnets, etc.

And for whatever reason, YouTube decided to make it incredibly obnoxious to get the thumbnail images — apparently “right click + save image” for YouTube videos just is not chill.

So here’s what you do instead:

You restructure the URL pattern of the YouTube Video (using the video ID) to get whichever version of the image you want.

Let’s take a look at how it’s done.

YouTube Video URL

For the example, I will use this YouTube video of mine where I store some of my most confidential information:

It’s helpful to first understand the primary structure of a YouTube video URL

Here’s the URL for that one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0nSPx4qLM8

YouTube Video URL Structure

There are 2 parts:

1. The Base URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=

2. Video ID: T0nSPx4qLM8

To get the image, you just need the Video ID!

YouTube Image URLs

There are many image resolutions available for YouTube videos, with the default thumbnail image being 120x90 pixels.

Aka “shit” 😂

Here are the different URL patterns which correspond to different image sizes & resolutions that you can use to grab the images:

1. Default Quality: http://img.youtube.com/vi/T0nSPx4qLM8/default.jpg

2. Medium Quality: http://img.youtube.com/vi/T0nSPx4qLM8/mqdefault.jpg

3. High Quality: http://img.youtube.com/vi/T0nSPx4qLM8/hqdefault.jpg

4. Standard Definition: http://img.youtube.com/vi/T0nSPx4qLM8/sddefault.jpg

5. Maximum Resolution: http://img.youtube.com/vi/T0nSPx4qLM8/maxresdefault.jpg

If it’s not already glaringly apparent how this shakes out, they only differ from the actual video URLs in a couple ways:

1. The images are hosted on a subdomain (img.youtube.com )

2. the URL path after the hostname is /vi/ instead of /watch?v= (probably because it stands for “video image” … I’m guessing)

3. After the Video ID there is another URL subpath which specifies the image resolution, ex: /maxresdefault.jpg

Here they are for each one, with an example of the image you get for each.

Default Quality

1. Base: http://img.youtube.com/vi/

2. Video ID: T0nSPx4qLM8

3. Suffix: /default.jpg

Fully constructed: http://img.youtube.com/vi/T0nSPx4qLM8/default.jpg

Medium Quality Default

1. Base: http://img.youtube.com/vi/

2. Video ID: T0nSPx4qLM8

3. Suffix: /mqdefault.jpg

Fully constructed: http://img.youtube.com/vi/T0nSPx4qLM8/mqdefault.jpg

High Quality Default

1. Base: http://img.youtube.com/vi/

2. Video ID: T0nSPx4qLM8

3. Suffix: /hqdefault.jpg

Fully constructed: http://img.youtube.com/vi/T0nSPx4qLM8/hqdefault.jpg

Standard Definition

1. Base: http://img.youtube.com/vi/

2. Video ID: T0nSPx4qLM8

3. Suffix: /sddefault.jpg

Fully constructed: http://img.youtube.com/vi/T0nSPx4qLM8/sddefault.jpg

Maximum Resolution Default

1. Base: http://img.youtube.com/vi/

2. Video ID: T0nSPx4qLM8

3. Suffix: /maxresdefault.jpg

Fully constructed:http://img.youtube.com/vi/T0nSPx4qLM8/maxresdefault.jpg

… Womp Womp.

I don’t have one (bc the image I uploaded originally was not high quality enough).

So all I get is this:

Final thoughts

To be fair…

There could be more image sizes but I thought that was enough.