I seem to find myself working with Youtubes thumbnail images quite a lot (for instance on Miniclips videos section) – and I am always having to go searching for the parameters to use to generate those thumbnail images.
The highest quality of these images is the maxresdefault.jpg image, but not all videos have these available. With that in mind I thought I would try and find out what the other parameters are and what they do.
So I made a little app to view them as you can see below:
For reference the urls are as follows:
4 Frames from Key Points in the animation
http://img.youtube.com/vi/[video-id]/0.jpg
http://img.youtube.com/vi/[video-id]/1.jpg
http://img.youtube.com/vi/[video-id]/2.jpg
http://img.youtube.com/vi/[video-id]/3.jpg
Default thumbnail (the one seen on Youtube itself)
http://img.youtube.com/vi/[video-id]/default.jpg
High Quality default image (hqdefault.jpg)
http://img.youtube.com/vi/[video-id]/hqdefault.jpg
Medium Quality default image (mqdefault.jpg)
http://img.youtube.com/vi/[video-id]/mqdefault.jpg
Standard definition thumbnail (sddefault.jpg)
http://img.youtube.com/vi/[video-id]/sddefault.jpg
The largest size thumbnail available (maxresdefault.jpg)
http://img.youtube.com/vi/[video-id]/maxresdefault.jpg
Let me know what you think on Mastodon, or BlueSky (or Twitter X if you must).