Get Video Thumbnail from Youtube URL Using PHP

Sometime it’s necessary to display the Thumbnail Image of a youtube video from URL. So in this tutorial am going to example you how to get the thumbnail image of a video from youtube. Here am using PHP to obtain the output.

To fetch the video thumbnail image from Youtube, first we need the get the video id from given URL.

//Youtube URL

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wqbC3_ZOQg

Now we can explode the URL and get the video ID (In this case 5wqbC3_ZOQg) using php.

//explode the url to get video id and save the id to a variable

$fetch=explode("v=", $url);

$videoid=$fetch[1];

Now pass this video id to the img src tag

//Display the image 

//Display 1st thumbnail

echo '<img src="http://img.youtube.com/vi/'.$videoid.'/1.jpg" height="90" width="100">';

This will display you the first thumbnail image. if you want to use second or third image just change the number in image src tag.

//Display 1st thumbnail

echo '<img src="http://img.youtube.com/vi/'.$videoid.'/2.jpg" height="90" width="100">';

Hope that you like this article if so please share the article. Thank You !