How can I download just thumbnails using youtube-dl?

Question

I've been trying to download the thumbnails of a list of URL's (youtube videos) I have.

I've been using youtube-dl and I've worked it out to this so far:

     import os

     with open('results.txt') as f:
          for line in f:
              os.system("youtube-dl " + "--write-thumbnail " + line)

Like this I'm able to download the thumbnails but I'm forced to downloading the youtube videos as well.

How can I just download the thumbnail?

Answer 1

You can simply add --skip-download to your code and it will work fine. Like so:

with open('urls.txt') as f:
for line in f:
    os.system("youtube-dl "+"--write-thumbnail "+"--skip-download "+line)

Answer 2

Building on the other answers, you can also specify the -a or --batch-file flag to provide a list of files to import from, which simplifies the code a bit:

youtube-dl -a urls.txt --write-thumbnail --skip-download