YouTube Thumbnail Scraper

About

YouTube Thumbnail Scraper extracts every video thumbnail visible on the YouTube page you're currently viewing — search results, channel uploads, playlists, home feed, trending, subscriptions, or hashtag pages. Export the thumbnails as JPG files and the metadata as a clean CSV. No API key. No login. No tracking.

WHY YOU'D USE IT
• Content creators studying competitor thumbnail design
• Marketers running thumbnail A/B research
• Designers building mood boards from top performers in a niche
• Analysts pulling video metadata into spreadsheets
• Anyone tired of right-click → save-image → repeat 100 times

WHAT IT EXPORTS
For every video on the page, you get:
• Video ID
• Title
• Channel name
• Duration
• View count
• Publish date
• Direct video URL
• Thumbnail URL (at your chosen quality)
• Live thumbnail URL from the page

THUMBNAIL QUALITY OPTIONS
• Max resolution (1280×720) — for design work
• SD (640×480)
• HQ (480×360) — universal fallback
• MQ (320×180)
• Default (120×90)

KEY FEATURES
• One-click bulk JPG download — saves to a named folder under Downloads
• CSV export for spreadsheet analysis
• Auto-scroll to load every lazy-rendered video tile
• Configurable scroll passes (1–100) for long channel feeds
• Per-tab session memory — accidentally close the popup, reopen, results are still there
• Auto-clear when you navigate to a new page (no stale data)
• Manual Clear Cache button
• Skips hidden tiles cached by YouTube's single-page-app routing
• Works on Search, Channel, Playlist, Home, Trending, Subscriptions, Shorts, Hashtag pages
• Works on www.youtube.com and m.youtube.com

PRIVACY
• No accounts, no signups, no analytics
• No data leaves your browser except the direct download requests to i.ytimg.com (YouTube's public thumbnail CDN)
• Open source — inspect every line of code
• Permissions limited to youtube.com and the thumbnail CDN

HOW IT WORKS
1. Open any YouTube page with videos
2. Click the extension icon
3. Choose thumbnail quality + scroll passes
4. Click "Scrape Page"
5. Click "Export CSV" or "Download Thumbnails"
6. Files land in ~/Downloads/<page-title>/

LIMITATIONS
• Thumbnails come from YouTube's public CDN. If a video doesn't have a max-resolution version, the extension falls back to HQ automatically.
• Chrome rate-limits batch downloads. For huge channels (500+ videos), download in chunks.
• Respects YouTube — does not bypass private videos, paywalls, or age gates. Only sees what your browser already sees.

This extension is for personal research and analysis. Respect copyright when reusing thumbnails.