Blog by iSquare Technologies.

YouTube is growing like anything and we often needs to integrate the YouTube videos into the websites. Embed code is not a preferred choice so most of the times, we need to use the YouTube API in order to fetch the contents and display on the website. So here, we are presenting a way to fetch YouTube Video Thumbnails dynamically for your PHP based website.

YouTube basically creates a lots of different types of thumbs on its server to be used on different devices. You can access these thumbs by using the video_ID of the YouTube video and also you can display the images on the website using a variable $link which holds the id of the video and substituting it in the place for video_ID in the link.

Mostly, Each YouTube video has four generated images. They are predictably formatted as follows:

Low Quality Thumbnail:

http://img.youtube.com/vi/<YouTube_Video_ID_HERE>/sddefault.jpg

Medium Quality Thumbnail:

http://img.youtube.com/vi/<YouTube_Video_ID_HERE>/mqdefault.jpg

High Quality Thumbnail:

http://img.youtube.com/vi/<YouTube_Video_ID_HERE>/hqdefault.jpg

Maximum Quality Thumbnail:

http://img.youtube.com/vi/<YouTube_Video_ID_HERE>/maxresdefault.jpg

So this is the basic understanding of how it works. But how to achieve this through PHP?

You can use YouTube Data API to retrieve video thumbnails. API version 3 requires a key*. Obtain the key and create a videos: list request.

Example PHP Code

$data = file_get_contents("https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/videos?key=YOUR_API_KEY&part=snippet&id=T0Jqdjbed40");
$json = json_decode($data);
var_dump($json->items[0]->snippet->thumbnails);

Decode the output and you will able to use the YouTube Video Thumbnail easily whenever you want.

And here is the handy PHP function to fetch YouTube Video Thumbnail Images:

function downloadYouTubeThubnailImage($youTubeLink='',$thumbNamilQuality='',$fileNameWithExt='',$fileDownLoadPath='')
    {
        $videoIdExploded = explode('?v=', $youTubeLink);   

        if ( sizeof($videoIdExploded) == 1) 
        {
            $videoIdExploded = explode('&v=', $youTubeLink);

            $videoIdEnd = end($videoIdExploded);

            $removeOtherInVideoIdExploded = explode('&',$videoIdEnd);

            $youTubeVideoId = current($removeOtherInVideoIdExploded);
        }else{
            $videoIdExploded = explode('?v=', $youTubeLink);

            $videoIdEnd = end($videoIdExploded);

            $removeOtherInVideoIdExploded = explode('&',$videoIdEnd);

            $youTubeVideoId = current($removeOtherInVideoIdExploded);
        }

        switch ($thumbNamilQuality) 
        {
            case 'LOW':
                    $imageUrl = 'http://img.youtube.com/vi/'.$youTubeVideoId.'/sddefault.jpg';
                break;

            case 'MEDIUM':
                    $imageUrl = 'http://img.youtube.com/vi/'.$youTubeVideoId.'/mqdefault.jpg';
                break;

            case 'HIGH':
                    $imageUrl = 'http://img.youtube.com/vi/'.$youTubeVideoId.'/hqdefault.jpg';
                break;

            case 'MAXIMUM':
                    $imageUrl = 'http://img.youtube.com/vi/'.$youTubeVideoId.'/maxresdefault.jpg';
                break;
            default:
                return  'Choose The Quality Between [ LOW (or) MEDIUM  (or) HIGH  (or)  MAXIMUM]';
                break;
        }  

        if( empty($fileNameWithExt) || is_null($fileNameWithExt)  || $fileNameWithExt === '') 
        {
            $toArray = explode('/',$imageUrl);
            $fileNameWithExt = md5( time().mt_rand( 1,10 ) ).'.'.substr(strrchr(end($toArray),'.'),1);
          }

          if (! is_dir($fileDownLoadPath)) 
            {
                mkdir($fileDownLoadPath,0777,true);
            }

            file_put_contents($fileDownLoadPath.$fileNameWithExt, file_get_contents($imageUrl));
            return $fileNameWithExt;   
    }