Get YouTube Video Thumbnail URL using PHP

YouTube is the world’s favorite video search engine. It’s very common now people use YouTube video in their websites/blog. Today’s tutorial we are demonstrating how to fetch YouTube video thumbnail using PHP.

Basically this simple PHP script fetch YouTube thumbnail image from a full YouTube video URL.

Get Thumbnail Image URL from YouTube Embed Code

$videoUrl = "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zy7wGbQgfw";
 parse_str( parse_url( $videoUrl, PHP_URL_QUERY ), $my_array_of_vars );
 $ytID = $my_array_of_vars['v']; //gets video ID

print "https://img.youtube.com/vi/<?php print $ytID?>/maxresdefault.jpg"; print "https://img.youtube.com/vi/<?php print $ytID?>/mqdefault.jpg"; print "https://img.youtube.com/vi/<?php print $ytID?>/hqdefault.jpg"; print "https://img.youtube.com/vi/<?php print $ytID?>/sddefault.jpg"; print "https://img.youtube.com/vi/<?php print $ytID?>/default.jpg";

To get different thumbnails

https://img.youtube.com/vi/<?php print $ytID?>/0.jpg
 https://img.youtube.com/vi/<?php print $ytID?>/1.jpg
 https://img.youtube.com/vi/<?php print $ytID?>/2.jpg
 https://img.youtube.com/vi/<?php print $ytID?>/3.jpg

Read this post to get more details about how to get YouTube thumbnail images manually.