How to scrape the thumbnail of a youtube video from id?

Question

I am very new to python, I'm wondering how I would just get the maxres thumbnail to print, instead of literally everything about the video. Sorry if the answer is a bit obvious, I am a bit new to python and programming in general.

from apiclient.discovery import build

DEVELOPER_KEY = 'xxxxxx'
youtube = build('youtube', 'v3', developerKey=DEVELOPER_KEY)

ids = '6Gw-RyTRMns'
results = youtube.videos().list(id=ids, part='snippet').execute()
for result in results.get('items', []):
    print(results)    

I'm also wondering if there is a way to grab a URL to a picture from a description of a given video and have it saved to a folder.

Answer 1

This has been made easy thanks to YouTube. They use links like the one below to retreive thumbnails at different resolutions. Assuming all you need is the URL, just format a string like this:

http://img.youtube.com/vi/<insert-youtube-video-id-here>/maxresdefault.jpg

You can find a similar question here: How do I get a YouTube video thumbnail from the YouTube API?

You can find more information on the Api here: https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/

To iterate over a channel you can find another similar question here: python: get all youtube video urls of a channel

To download the images you could use something like this.

import urllib
urllib.urlretrieve("http://img.youtube.com/vi/ytvideo/0.jpg")

Answer 2

For those reading this answer now, the updated url method is:

http://img.youtube.com/vi/<insert-youtube-video-id-here>/hqdefault.jpg

Answer 3

Here is a simple code. The regular expression matches all the shared and embedded URLs

import re
url = # Any Youtube URL
exp = "^.*((youtu.be\/)|(v\/)|(\/u\/\w\/)|(embed\/)|(watch\?))\??v?=?([^#&?]*).*"
s = re.findall(exp,url)[0][-1]
thumbnail = f"https://i.ytimg.com/vi/{s}/maxresdefault.jpg"
print(thumbnail)

Answer 4

Add os.chdir to manipulate directories to store thumnails.

import re
import requests
import os

#urls to id
url = "YouTube URL"
exp = "^.*((youtu.be\/)|(v\/)|(\/u\/\w\/)|(embed\/)|(watch\?))\??v?=?([^#&?]*).*"
s = re.findall(exp,url)[0][-1]
thumbnail = f"https://i.ytimg.com/vi/{s}/maxresdefault.jpg"

#image scraping
def imagedown(url, folder):
    try:
        os.mkdir(os.path.join(os.getcwd(), folder))
    except:
        pass
    os.chdir(os.path.join(os.getcwd(), folder))

    name = url
    link = url
    with open(name.replace(' ', '-').replace('/', '') + '.jpg', 'wb') as f:
        im = requests.get(link)
        f.write(im.content)
        print('Writing: ', name)

imagedown(thumbnail, 'image')