How to get a youtube playlist thumbnail?

Question

Is there a way to get youtube playlist thumbnail like how you can get a thumbnail of a video, explained here: How do I get a YouTube video thumbnail from the YouTube API?

Answer 1

With the YouTube API v3, you can get the playlist thumbnail using their v3/playlists endpoint and drilling down to items.snippet.thumbnails.high.url

For the following playlist:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL50C17441DA8A565D

YouTube's API explorer has a playlist endpoint:

https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/playlists/list

This is the API call:

GET https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/playlists?part=snippet&id=PL50C17441DA8A565D&key={YOUR_API_KEY}

And here is the response:

    {
     "kind": "youtube#playlistListResponse",
     "items": [
      {
       "kind": "youtube#playlist",
       "id": "PL50C17441DA8A565D",
       "snippet": {
        "title": "Jay Chou Playlist",
        "thumbnails": {
         "default": {
          "url": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/kGbDymJ75PU/default.jpg",
          "width": 120,
          "height": 90
         },
         "medium": {
          "url": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/kGbDymJ75PU/mqdefault.jpg",
          "width": 320,
          "height": 180
         },
         "high": {
          "url": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/kGbDymJ75PU/hqdefault.jpg",
          "width": 480,
          "height": 360
         }
        },
        "channelTitle": "it23"
       }
      }
     ]
    }

Answer 2

This is what worked for me. Similar to the other post regarding playlist items but I just changed the API call. Hope it helps.

//get playlist itmes

$data = file_get_contents("https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/playlistItems?key=< YOUR API KEY >&part=snippet&playlistId="<Put your playlist id here>");

//decode response from youtube

$json = json_decode($data);

//if you want to see the full response use print_r($json);

//each items in the response corresponds to a video in the playlist so lets get the first video (items[0]) get its snippet and corresponding thumbnails and we will take the url for the default size. If you want the second video use items [1] etc.

$video_thumbnail = $json->items[0]->snippet->thumbnails->default->url;

//set the videos alt tag as the snippet description

$video_alt = $json->items[0]->snippet->description; 

//echo the image url into an image tag

echo '<img src="'. $video_thumbnail .'" alt="'. $video_alt .'" />';