https://vo.rs/tags/youtube/Youtube - Tag - vo.rsHugo -- gohugo.ioenThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.Thu, 16 May 2019 16:45:00 +0000https://vo.rs/story/youtube-video-thumbnails/<p>I once built a little dashboard that needed a preview image for every YouTube video in a list of a few hundred. My first instinct was to reach for the YouTube Data API, request an OAuth token, wire up quota handling, and cache the responses. Two hours later I had a working call and a nagging feeling I had massively over-engineered it. It turns out you almost never need the API to get a thumbnail. YouTube exposes every thumbnail it generates at a fixed, guessable URL keyed off the video ID, and if all you want is the image, you can skip the whole authentication dance. This post is the thing I wish I had read before opening the API console.</p>Thu, 16 May 2019 16:45:00 +0000