How To Download a Thumbnail From YouTube Videos

YouTube allows you to make your own thumbnail for the video you upload. But there’s a time when someone made a really good thumbnail that you want to save it offline. Here’s how to download a thumbnail from YouTube videos.

YouTube, unfortunately, doesn’t allow you to save a YouTube video thumbnail directly from the site. There’s no button to do so, just like when you try to download a YouTube video.

But that doesn’t mean you have to rely on third-party tools to just download YouTube videos’ thumbnails. You can download a video thumbnail by just modifying its video URL.

Is it fine or legal to save a YouTube thumbnail?

As long as you don’t use the saved thumbnail for commercial purposes that you don’t have the right to, it should be fine.

How to download a thumbnail from YouTube videos

To save a thumbnail, simply open the YouTube video which the thumbnail you want to save. On the address bar of your browser, select the video ID (right after watch?v=) and copy it, then paste it to somewhere like Notepad.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaQJbozY_Is

Remove the rest of the URL but keep the ID:

xaQJbozY_Is

This URL below is the URL where you can save the thumbnail of a YouTube video. Simply replace the [ID] with the actual ID of the YouTube video.

https://img.youtube.com/vi/ID/maxresdefault.jpg

This is what the actual thumbnail URL would look like:

https://img.youtube.com/vi/xaQJbozY_Is/maxresdefault.jpg

Now, you can save the thumbnail by right-clicking on it, then select Save image as.

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YouTube doesn’t really allow you to save thumbnails. Good thing there’s a trick to do that. Just make sure you don’t use the thumbnail for commercial purposes.

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