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Vimeo thumbnail downloader

Paste a Vimeo link and get its poster frame at the largest size Vimeo publishes.

What this does

Vimeo does not expose its thumbnails at predictable URLs the way YouTube does, so this tool asks Vimeo's public oEmbed endpoint for the video's poster frame and hands you the file it names. You get the title, the uploader, the duration and the thumbnail at the size Vimeo stores it, plus a widened request for the largest version the CDN will serve. It works on ordinary vimeo.com links, player.vimeo.com embed links and channel or showcase links that resolve to a single video. Private videos, password-protected videos and videos whose owner has switched off embedding return nothing, because oEmbed returns nothing for them — that is the platform's privacy setting doing its job, not a failure here.

How to download a Vimeo thumbnail

  1. 01

    Copy the Vimeo link

    The address bar of the video page, the Share dialog's link, or a player.vimeo.com embed URL. The numeric video id on its own works too.

  2. 02

    Fetch the poster frame

    The link goes to Vimeo's oEmbed endpoint, which answers with the video's title, its duration and the address of its thumbnail. Only the URL you pasted is sent, and only to Vimeo.

  3. 03

    Download it

    The image is shown with its true pixel dimensions so you know what you are getting before you save it.

Questions

Why does a private Vimeo video return nothing?

Vimeo's oEmbed endpoint refuses to describe videos that are private, password-protected or restricted to particular domains. There is no way around that from outside, and there should not be — the owner set it deliberately.

What size is a Vimeo thumbnail?

It depends on the source video. Vimeo generates the poster frame from the master file, so a 4K upload has a much larger thumbnail than a 720p one. The tool prints the actual width and height of the file it found rather than promising a size it cannot know in advance.

Can I pick a different frame as the thumbnail?

Not from here — the poster frame is whatever the video's owner set in Vimeo. If it is your own video, change it in Vimeo's settings. If you need a specific frame out of a file you have locally, the frame grabber does that without uploading anything.

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