Simple Trick To Capture Screenshot Of a YouTube Video Without a Screen Capture Tool

Capturing a screenshot of a YouTube video is so easy, you maximize the YouTube video to full screen mode and then hit the Print screen button on your keyboard. This captures a snapshot of your entire screen, which can then be edited in any image editing program or MS-paint.

There is Aviary- another smart web based screen capture tool which lets you capture the screenshot of any webpage in seconds. Just append aviary.com/ before the URL of a YouTube video and the snapshot can be edited or customized from the browser.

However, here is a secret trick which will let you download the video thumbnails of a YouTube video without using any screen capture tool.

Here are the steps:

1. Copy the URL of a YouTube video e.g http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XX

2. Enter http://img.youtube.com/vi/XX/0.jpg in a new browser tab, XX being the video ID

3. Bingo! You are shown a thumbnail of the YouTube video right from the browser.

4. You can find more thumbnails of the same video by replacing 0 with 1,2,3 in the image URL – e.g http://img.youtube.com/vi/XX/1.jpg

Example: I tried this trick using this video, and I was shown this image thumbnail. Neat !

The thumbnail is chosen randomly from the first few seconds of your video. I agree that you can’t use this trick to capture a screenshot of a deeper video scene, but this trick will be useful if you want to show just the preview thumbnail image of a YouTube video.

If you write a blog or have a website, you can use this trick to add YouTube video thumbnails to you website’s design template. There is no need to capture and save the screenshot of a YouTube video, upload it to your website’s file serve, copy the image path location and use it on your website’s theme or template. You can simply grab the video thumbnail URL, which comes by default with each and every YouTube video and use it on your website.

YouTube does not pose any restrictions or bandwidth issues if a website publisher is using the thumbnail images on his website. But don’t ovedo, which might appear spammy

There is no need to download or install anything, just remember the URL.

Also read: YouTube URL Tricks