YouTube Thumbnail Generator

September 1, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Okay so, I’ve gone back to this blog post at least ten times in the last month to copy the very mysterious, yet deliciously helpful, code that allows me to easily generate YouTube video thumbnails for use in our blogs.  In the author’s own words…

“This could be useful to display thumbnails with links in your sidebar, or to replace the YouTube embed code with a video within your RSS feed. Attempting to write your own YouTube thumbnail generator could be quite a task.

The good news is that you don’t actually have to generate a thumbnail, YouTube actually has several waiting for you:

Here’s the video – notice the video id?

  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?SgGVitTU9F8

Here are the images in a couple sizes and frames, note the video id is embedded in the URL:

  • http://img.youtube.com/vi/SgGVitTU9F8/0.jpg
  • http://img.youtube.com/vi/SgGVitTU9F8/1.jpg
  • http://img.youtube.com/vi/SgGVitTU9F8/2.jpg

Our friend and client, Douglas Karr, first showed us how it was done. You can read the whole post on the Marketing Tech Blog, and you should definitely subscribe to the blog for lots more helpful tips like this one.

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Filed Under: Blog
About Rocky Walls

With more than 10 years’ experience in digital content creation, as CEO of 12 Stars Media Productions, Rocky works with companies to create online video content for use on websites, blog posts, email marketing and social media profiles.

In 2009 he received a nomination for the Most Influential Social Media Up & Comer and in 2010, 12 Stars Media was nominated as Indiana's Most Ethical Company at the Indiana Social Media Summit.

Rocky also currently serves as one of the first five Honorary Commanders of the 434th Air Refueling Wing at Grissom Air Reserve Base and regularly serves in a leadership capacity as a member of Business Networking International (BNI).

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