How To Download A Thumbnail Image From YouTube
There are a few different ways that you can get thumbnails from a YouTube video, one of which is to use YouTube’s Video API to extract the thumbnail. YouTube API responses may contain multiple thumbnail images for a video, each of which is identified by a tag. Creating a call to YouTube to get the video and thumbnail information can take some time and when you are like me and don’t know a think about writing code, then the API is relatively useless. For me, I needed a simple way to pull down a thumbnail and thankfully, there is a simple way to do this.
Here is the YouTube URL format that you will need in order to view and download a thumbnail from a YouTube video:
http://img.youtube.com/vi/VIDEO_ID/#.jpg
… where for the video example above, VIDEO_ID=bQVoAWSP7k4 and # (1,2, or 3) corresponds to one of the 3 thumbnails that YouTube automatically generates.
#2, is the default thumbnail, or the one that the owner ends up choosing for their video.
Using this convention, below are the URLs and the thumbnails that I was able to pull off of YouTube for the “wedding proposal” video from Jeremy’s post.
1st Thumbnail Image, Small (120×90)
http://img.youtube.com/vi/bQVoAWSP7k4/1.jpg

3rd Thumbnail Image, Small (120×90)
http://img.youtube.com/vi/bQVoAWSP7k4/3.jpg

2nd | Default Thumbnail Image, Small (120×90)
http://img.youtube.com/vi/bQVoAWSP7k4/2.jpg

Default Thumbnail Image, Full-Size (480×360)
http://img.youtube.com/vi/bQVoAWSP7k4/0.jpg

Nguồn:
http://www.reelseo.com/youtube-thumbnail-image/- http://code.google.com/intl/vi-VN/apis/youtube/2.0/reference.html