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

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="");

//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 '';