Get YouTube video thumbnail and use it with PHP

YouTube stores many different types of thumbnails on its server for different devices. You can access it by using the video id which every YouTube video has. You can display the images on your website using a variable $link which holds the id of the video and substituting it in the place for video_ID in the link.

Low quality thumbnail:

http://img.youtube.com/vi/<YouTube_Video_ID_HERE>/sddefault.jpg

Medium quality thumbnail:

http://img.youtube.com/vi/<YouTube_Video_ID_HERE>/mqdefault.jpg

High quality thumbnail:

http://img.youtube.com/vi/<YouTube_Video_ID_HERE>/hqdefault.jpg

Maximum quality thumbnail:

http://img.youtube.com/vi/<YouTube_Video_ID_HERE>/maxresdefault.jpg

Example:

If you want to access the thumbnail of the following video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-GYwhqDo6o

Video ID : Q-GYwhqDo6o

So, this is how video thumbnail link looks like:

http://img.youtube.com/vi/Q-GYwhqDo6o/mqdefault.jpg

Hope it helps. Enjoy coding.

You can use the below code. It is work for me. Choose the image quality as per your requirement.

<?php
$youtubeID = getYouTubeVideoId('youtube video url');
$thumbURL = 'https://img.youtube.com/vi/' . $youtubeID . '/mqdefault.jpg';
print_r($thumbURL);

function getYouTubeVideoId($pageVideUrl) {
    $link = $pageVideUrl;
    $video_id = explode("?v=", $link);
    if (!isset($video_id[1])) {
        $video_id = explode("youtu.be/", $link);
    }
    $youtubeID = $video_id[1];
    if (empty($video_id[1])) $video_id = explode("/v/", $link);
    $video_id = explode("&", $video_id[1]);
    $youtubeVideoID = $video_id[0];
    if ($youtubeVideoID) {
        return $youtubeVideoID;
    } else {
        return false;
    }
}
?>

To get high-quality image you can use the following URL which is fetched from youtube API

$video_id = explode("?v=", $link);
$video_id = $video_id[1];
$thumbnail="http://img.youtube.com/vi/".$video_id."/maxresdefault.jpg";