About This Site

Who runs it

YouTube-Thumbnail-Download.App is built and maintained by one independent developer working alone. There is no company behind it, no team and no investor. It started as a small utility for pulling a thumbnail at full size instead of saving whatever small copy a browser had cached, and it grew into a set of pages as more image types were added. The site is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by YouTube or Google, and the name YouTube is used here only to say which service the tools read.

What the tools do

Every page takes a YouTube address and returns the public images behind it, at every size that exists, with the pixel dimensions shown on each card so you can pick before you download.

• The video, Shorts, Music and live pages each read one video link and return the full set of thumbnail files stored for it, including the stills YouTube cuts from the footage.
• The channel art page returns a channel's banner and profile picture together; the banner and profile picture pages return one of the two on its own, with the sizes and crop rules explained.
• The playlist page returns the cover art of a public playlist.

Each page also keeps a short list of your recent lookups so you can go back to one without pasting the link again. Every download is the file YouTube stores: nothing here upscales, re-encodes or watermarks an image.

How it works

Thumbnails live on YouTube's image host at an address built from the video ID, so the video pages work that address out in your browser and load the pictures straight from Google. No copy passes through a server of ours, which is why those pages need no key and no sign in. The 'Download all' button zips the files in the browser as well.

Channel and playlist lookups are the one exception, because a handle or a playlist ID has to be turned into image addresses through the YouTube Data API first. Leave the key field blank on those pages and the lookup goes through a small backend of ours that carries a shared key. Enter your own key instead and the request goes from your browser directly to Google, so the key never reaches our server.

Accounts and data

There is no sign up, no login and no profile. Recent searches are held in your own browser's local storage so the list survives a reload, and clearing it removes them for good; that list is never sent anywhere. The site does use analytics and advertising partners, and the privacy policy sets out what they collect.

Contact

Write with a bug report, a link a page could not read, a takedown request, or a correction to anything stated here. Mail is read by the developer, and a reply usually takes a few days.

Policies

The two documents that apply when you use the site:

• Terms of Use sets out permitted use, the disclaimers, and the limits of liability.
• Privacy Policy covers cookies, analytics, advertising, and what happens to an API key you enter.