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High-quality YouTube Thumbnail Download in Three Ways

Author by Vita

Updated on Sep 15, 2023

If you happen to find some attractive and beautiful YouTube thumbnails and want to save them on your computer, phone or tablet, there are a few easy YouTube thumbnail download methods you can try.

Tips. This YouTube downloader can help you download the whole YouTube video and audio from a playlist or channel:

A YouTube thumbnail is the cover of a YouTube video. While browsing YouTube, many viewer prefer to look at video thumbnail and decide whether to click on a video. You can save YouTube thumbnails as individual images. As with downloading YouTube videos, there are multiple ways to do YouTube thumbnail downloads.

Today, we'll share three effective ways to download YouTube thumbnails. Just read and follow.

Also Read: Convert YouTube to MP3 Longer than 2 Hours l Best YouTube Downloader for Windows 10 l YouTube to USB Converter

This tutorial is only for downloading your own thumbnails or YouTube thumbnails of others that you have permission to download. Please do not download any copyrighted content without approval.

Method 1: Download YouTube Thumbnail on YouTube Studio

After uploading a video to YouTube, YouTube will generate three default thumbnails and you can also make a custom thumbnail for uploading. To download thumbnails of your own YouTube videos, you can follow the steps below. 

Step 1. Visit YouTube Studio: https://studio.youtube.com/

Step 2. Go to the Content section, hover over the video you want to download thumbnails from, and hit the pencil icon.

Save YouTube thumbnail

Step 3. On the Video details page, scroll down to the Thumbnail section. Here is a selection of thumbnails for the video. If you want to save one of the auto-generated thumbnails, select the target one and right click and select “Save image as…”. But the output image quality is crappy. If you have once uploaded a custom thumbnail and want to download it now, hover over the thumbnail, and there will be a three-dots button on the top right corner of the thumbnail, hit it then choose “Download”.

Get thumbnail from YouTube video

Method 2: Any YouTube Thumbnail Download with Video ID

Video ID refers to the unique alphanumeric code for each YouTube video. By means of video ID, you can download the thumbnail of any YouTube video that is public. To find the video ID of a YouTube video, open the video on YouTube, and the top address bar shows the current URL. The video ID is right after v= in the URL.

Let’s take an example of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2EgvEH2QGU. Its video ID is V2EgvEH2QGU.

After you get the video ID, type the following URL in the address bar of your browser and replace yt-video-idin this URL with the actual video ID.

Default: https://img.youtube.com/vi/yt-video-id/default.jpg
High Quality: https://img.youtube.com/vi/yt-video-id/hqdefault.jpg
Medium Quality: https://img.youtube.com/vi/yt-video-id/mqdefault.jpg
Standard Definition: https://img.youtube.com/vi/yt-video-id/sddefault.jpg
Maximum Resolution: https://img.youtube.com/vi/yt-video-id/maxresdefault.jpg

Press Enter on your keyboard and the full size version of the thumbnail will appear then. Right click and select “Save image as” for YouTube thumbnail download.

YouTube thumbnail grabber

The above steps are on how to download custom YouTube thumbnail, namely the one you can view as the cover of a video. Meanwhile, as noted previously, YouTube provides three auto-generated thumbnails for video. You can also download them with the help of the video ID. The process is the same as the one of downloading custom one. You need to enter the following URL and replace VIDEOID with the real ID and replace thumbnail number with 1, 2, or 3.

http://img.youtube.com/vi/VIDEOID/thumbnail number.jpg

Eg. http://img.youtube.com/vi/hpfKdvJYCsc/1.jpg

However, the auto-generated thumbnails you can get are in 120×90, which is quite tiny and useless if your intention is a large-size picture.

Method 3: Dedicated YouTube Thumbnail Downloader

Apart from the two simple and effective methods for YouTube thumbnail download, you can use a specific tool to further simplify the process. What I am talking about is the exceptionally useful YouTube thumbnail downloader – youtubethumbnaildownloader.com. Compared with the methods above, it requires fewer steps and offers more convenience. Here is how to download YouTube thumbnail using this tool.

Step 1. Open the YouTube thumbnail: https://www.youtubethumbnaildownloader.com/

Step 2. Copy and paste the URL of the YouTube video into the blank box.

Step 3. Three options of thumbnail size will be displayed – small, medium, and full hd. Choose a size, hit the green download button, then right click and choose “Save image as”.

That’s the whole process.  

YouTube video thumbnail downloader

In Summary

How to get YouTube thumbnail free? All the three methods can help you work it out. Now you can try them and download high-quality, descriptive, and creative thumbnails from YouTube with ease.

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