YouTube Thumbnail Downloader — Bulk, All Sizes

Get the thumbnail for any list of YouTube videos — in bulk, in every size, verified to actually exist. Paste full URLs, youtu.be short links, Shorts/embed links, or bare video IDs, and get back clean, structured thumbnail data (and optionally the image files themselves).

Why "verified" matters

YouTube thumbnails live at predictable URLs — but maxresdefault.jpg does not exist for every video. Older videos, low-res uploads, and many auto-generated videos 404 on it. Naive tools just construct the URL and hand you a broken link; your gallery or CMS then shows grey placeholder boxes.

This actor checks every URL and automatically falls back down the size ladder (maxres → sd → hq → mq → default), so bestAvailable is always a real, working image at the highest resolution that exists for that video.

Sizes

Size	Dimensions
maxresdefault	1280 × 720
sddefault	640 × 480
hqdefault	480 × 360
mqdefault	320 × 180
default	120 × 90

Select one or several — you get every requested size that exists, plus bestAvailable.

Use cases

• Content curation & newsletters — pull crisp cover images for the videos you feature
• Video galleries & landing pages — build thumbnail grids without a single broken image
• CMS & blog imports — bulk-fetch cover images when migrating or embedding video libraries
• ML / computer-vision datasets — collect labelled thumbnail images at known resolutions
• YouTube tooling & analytics — thumbnails for dashboards, competitor research, A/B swipe files

What you get

One record per video:

{
  "videoId": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "bestAvailable": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/dQw4w9WgXcQ/maxresdefault.jpg",
  "bestAvailableSize": "maxresdefault",
  "bestAvailableWidth": 1280,
  "bestAvailableHeight": 720,
  "thumbnails": {
    "maxresdefault": { "url": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/dQw4w9WgXcQ/maxresdefault.jpg", "width": 1280, "height": 720 }
  }
}

• Deleted / private / non-existent videos are skipped — logged as a warning, never pushed to the dataset, so you're never charged for them
• Duplicate URLs are deduped automatically
• Turn on Download images to also save each thumbnail into the run's key-value store — each record then includes a direct kvsUrl you can hotlink or download

Input formats accepted

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
• https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ
• https://www.youtube.com/shorts/..., /embed/..., /live/...
• Bare 11-character video IDs: dQw4w9WgXcQ

Export & integrations

Results land in an Apify dataset — export CSV, Excel, JSON, or connect Google Sheets, Make, Zapier, Slack, and webhooks via Apify integrations.

No API key, no YouTube Data API quota, no login — thumbnails are served from YouTube's public image CDN.

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Need something more custom? Channel-wide thumbnail pulls, video metadata (titles, view counts, durations) alongside the images, WebP variants, or a fully managed pipeline into your CMS — message me via my Apify profile and I'll build it.