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I am very new to python, I'm wondering how I would just get the maxres thumbnail to print, instead of literally everything about the video. Sorry if the answer is a bit obvious, I am a bit new to python and programming in general.

from apiclient.discovery import build

DEVELOPER_KEY = 'xxxxxx'
youtube = build('youtube', 'v3', developerKey=DEVELOPER_KEY)

ids = '6Gw-RyTRMns'
results = youtube.videos().list(id=ids, part='snippet').execute()
for result in results.get('items', []):
    print(results)

I'm also wondering if there is a way to grab a URL to a picture from a description of a given video and have it saved to a folder.

yevvy
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4 Answers4

9

This has been made easy thanks to YouTube. They use links like the one below to retreive thumbnails at different resolutions. Assuming all you need is the URL, just format a string like this:

http://img.youtube.com/vi/<insert-youtube-video-id-here>/maxresdefault.jpg

You can find a similar question here: How do I get a YouTube video thumbnail from the YouTube API?

You can find more information on the Api here: https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/

To iterate over a channel you can find another similar question here: python: get all youtube video urls of a channel

To download the images you could use something like this.

import urllib
urllib.urlretrieve("http://img.youtube.com/vi/ytvideo/0.jpg")
Community
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James
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  • how would I go about doing the second part of my question? – yevvy Oct 28 '16 at 03:19
  • In that question did you mean to get links directly out of a videos description? – James Oct 28 '16 at 03:20
  • If so I would suggest using regex, you can find an example of this here: maxresdefault.jpg – James Oct 28 '16 at 03:25
  • http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6883049/regex-to-find-urls-in-string-in-python – James Oct 28 '16 at 03:26
  • @yevvy I've updated the answer with a link you could use to implement this – James Oct 28 '16 at 03:29
  • I'm still not really sure on what exactly to do (in my first question). My main goal is to try to scrape the thumbnails of a large number, if not all of the videos off of a channel. Is there a way to get the id of every video on a channel, input it into a script, and have it save all of the pictures into a folder besides going through and saving all of the images myself? – yevvy Oct 28 '16 at 03:42
  • @yevvy This may be what you're looking for: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15512239/python-get-all-youtube-video-urls-of-a-channel – James Oct 28 '16 at 03:47
  • yes but then how would I get the ID of all of them and what would I put it into to get a list of every link to the thumbnail of every video – yevvy Oct 28 '16 at 04:16
  • @yevvy After you create a function using the API to iterate over the videos, you will be given a list of metadata from the API, you can access this with something like `id = api_result['video_id']` add this to a list `listname.append(id)` then iterate over that list using the code I have provided to download the thumbnails. I highly suggest that you read Youtubes very details Api reference that directly answers you question here https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/guides/implementation/videos#videos-retrieve-uploads – James Oct 28 '16 at 04:37
3

For those reading this answer now, the updated url method is:

http://img.youtube.com/vi/<insert-youtube-video-id-here>/hqdefault.jpg
Yaakov Bressler
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2

Here is a simple code. The regular expression matches all the shared and embedded URLs

import re
url = # Any Youtube URL
exp = "^.*((youtu.be\/)|(v\/)|(\/u\/\w\/)|(embed\/)|(watch\?))\??v?=?([^#&?]*).*"
s = re.findall(exp,url)[0][-1]
thumbnail = f"https://i.ytimg.com/vi/{s}/maxresdefault.jpg"
print(thumbnail)
Viraj Mane
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0

Add os.chdir to manipulate directories to store thumnails.

import re
import requests
import os

#urls to id
url = "YouTube URL"
exp = "^.*((youtu.be\/)|(v\/)|(\/u\/\w\/)|(embed\/)|(watch\?))\??v?=?([^#&?]*).*"
s = re.findall(exp,url)[0][-1]
thumbnail = f"https://i.ytimg.com/vi/{s}/maxresdefault.jpg"

#image scraping
def imagedown(url, folder):
    try:
        os.mkdir(os.path.join(os.getcwd(), folder))
    except:
        pass
    os.chdir(os.path.join(os.getcwd(), folder))

    name = url
    link = url
    with open(name.replace(' ', '-').replace('/', '') + '.jpg', 'wb') as f:
        im = requests.get(link)
        f.write(im.content)
        print('Writing: ', name)

imagedown(thumbnail, 'image')
Ryan
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