How to Bulk Download Thumbnail Images of a list of YouTube videos using YT-DLP (youtube-dl) (Mac)

I had a long list of YouTube URLs and needed to easily download the thumbnail images of them. Here's the solution I used!

1. Install YT-DLP -- This cool command line tool for Windows and Mac is a forked successor of youtube-dl and does a lot of nifty things. Follow the easy instructions to install YT-DLP. Note that Python must also be installed on your computer.
    
2. Create a plain text file containing the list of YouTube URLs, with one URL per line.
    
3. Open Terminal on Mac (or equivalent on PC) and navigate to the directory where you would like to save the thumbnails (e.g. cd ~/Downloads)
    
4. Enter the following command:

   yt-dlp --ignore-errors -a /path-to-youtube-url-list-goes-here.txt --write-thumbnail --skip-download

   What is happening here? We're skipping errors with any of the URL's (such as a video that is private), indicating where the text file of URLs is, saving the thumbnail and not downloading the entire YouTube video.
    

5. Hit enter on the command above and yt-dlp will quickly download the thumbnail images to your computer to the directory you navigated to in step 3 above.
    
6. Some thumbnails will be .jpg files, but some will likely be .webp files. That's kind of annoying. You may have to convert them to .jpg if it's important to you. I personally bulk convert files to .jpg using a MacOS Automator workflow -- which is possibly a separate blog post at some point! Let me know if you're curious about this by reaching out or submitting a comment below.

References

• YouTube-DL Read Me with options explained
• How can I download just thumbnails using youtube-dl?
• Skip private videos in youtube-dl download
• YouTube-DL tutorial with examples

Did this work for you? Not work for you? Please leave a quick comment to let me know! Thanks!