YouTube Thumbnail Downloader & Metadata Viewer

Paste a link. It is read here in the page, with nothing contacted. Then one button fetches every thumbnail size the video actually has, plus its public title and channel.

Links are parsed in your browser with no network access. Pressing Fetch requests public files directly from i.ytimg.com and www.youtube.com — no server of ours is involved, and nothing is stored.

What pressing Fetch does: Your browser requests public files directly from two Google hosts: the thumbnail images from i.ytimg.com, and the public oEmbed record from www.youtube.com. Each request is an anonymous GET of a public file and carries only the video id you pasted — no cookies, no credentials, no referrer and no account information. There is no server of ours in between, nothing is logged or stored, and until you press the button this page contacts nothing at all.

A thumbnail is someone’s work: These files are published by YouTube for previews and link cards, and they remain the copyright of whoever made them. Reposting a creator’s thumbnail as your own, or using one to imply an endorsement, is not made lawful by it being easy. This tool downloads nothing but the public preview image, and it does not download videos, bypass any access control or touch private data.

ToolAcre is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by YouTube or Google LLC. "YouTube" is a trademark of Google LLC, used here only to describe what this tool is compatible with.

Exactly what this tool touches

The input is one thing: a YouTube URL, or a bare eleven-character video id, that you type or paste. Nothing is discovered, crawled or suggested, and there is no search.

That link is parsed in this page with the network untouched. Watch links, youtu.be links, Shorts, live URLs, embed URLs and bare ids are all recognised, and the video id is extracted locally. If you never press Fetch, this page never contacts anything.

  1. Public thumbnail files, requested from i.ytimg.com — the same static images YouTube serves for previews and link cards.
  2. The public oEmbed record, requested from www.youtube.com using YouTube’s own documented oEmbed endpoint, which returns the title, the channel name and the thumbnail URL.
  3. Caption files that YOU supply, read entirely in the page, plus one optional timedtext URL you paste yourself, which is restricted to www.youtube.com.
  4. Embed code built locally against www.youtube-nocookie.com, the privacy-enhanced host, so an embedded player sets no cookie until a visitor presses play.

What it does not do

This is a thumbnail and metadata viewer. It is not a video downloader, and the things below are excluded deliberately rather than missing by accident.

  1. It does not download videos or audio. There is no stream handling, no muxing and no media extraction of any kind.
  2. It does not bypass access controls, authentication, age gates or DRM, and it sends no cookies or credentials, so it cannot act as a signed-in user.
  3. It does not scrape protected content. It reads a documented public endpoint and static public image files, and it never parses a watch page or a site’s internal application state.
  4. It does not fetch private, unlisted-by-link-only or deleted content: a video that oEmbed will not describe publicly simply returns nothing here.
  5. It does not solve signatures, ciphers or player tokens, and there is no server of ours to route a request through.

Why captions have to come from you

Thumbnails are static files on a host that permits cross-origin reads, so a web page can fetch them. Captions are not: the timedtext endpoints return zero bytes without a player token, and the watch page sends no cross-origin header, so no web page can read either.

Working around that would mean forging a player session from a server, which is exactly the class of behaviour this tool excludes. So you bring the file — from YouTube Studio for your own video, from a client, or from any transcription tool — and everything else works in the page, offline.

Trademark and affiliation

ToolAcre is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by YouTube or Google LLC. "YouTube" is a trademark of Google LLC, used here only to describe what this tool is compatible with.

This page does not imitate YouTube’s visual identity. It uses none of its colours, none of its logos, and no mark or layout that could suggest an official product. The word appears here for one reason: to tell you which service the tool reads links from.