Adding YouTube thumbnails and real titles to existing projects

Sometimes the best UX fix is the one that requires no new infrastructure. Here's how we added YouTube thumbnails and real video titles to ClipCrafter project cards — using only what was already in the database and what YouTube freely provides.

The problem

Project cards on the dashboard looked like this:

Title: YouTube video (8fcJ4Y-uxCw)
Thumbnail: none
Status badge, timestamp, action buttons

Not great. Users couldn't tell their projects apart at a glance. The fix seemed obvious — store the real title and a thumbnail URL. But that would mean:

A database migration to add a thumbnail_url column
A backfill for existing rows
Storing the title at upload time

We did none of those things.

Fix 1: Real titles via YouTube's oEmbed API

YouTube's oEmbed endpoint returns video metadata including the title — no API key required:

GET https://www.youtube.com/oembed?url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID&format=json

Response:

{
  "title": "The actual video title",
  "author_name": "Channel Name",
  "thumbnail_url": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/.../hqdefault.jpg",
  ...
}

We call this during project creation, before inserting to the database:

async function fetchYoutubeTitle(url: string): Promise<string | null> {
  try {
    const res = await fetch(
      `https://www.youtube.com/oembed?url=${encodeURIComponent(url)}&format=json`
    );
    if (!res.ok) return null;
    const data = await res.json() as { title?: string };
    return data.title ?? null;
  } catch {
    return null;
  }
}

async function submitYoutubeUrl(url: string): Promise<void> {
  const ytMatch = url.match(/(?:v=|youtu\.be\/)([a-zA-Z0-9_-]{11})/);
  const fallback = ytMatch ? `YouTube video (${ytMatch[1]})` : url;
  const title = (await fetchYoutubeTitle(url)) ?? fallback;

  // title is now "How to Build a Rocket" instead of "YouTube video (dQw4w9WgXcQ)"
  await createProject({ title, type: "youtube", youtubeUrl: url });
}

A few things worth noting:

The fallback is always safe. If the oEmbed call fails (private video, network error, rate limit), we fall back to the ID-based title. The user flow never breaks.
The title is stored, not fetched on read. This means no repeated API calls and the title survives even if the video is later deleted or made private.
No API key. YouTube's oEmbed endpoint is publicly accessible. It works for any public video.

Fix 2: Thumbnails from a predictable URL pattern

YouTube serves thumbnails at deterministic URLs:

https://img.youtube.com/vi/{VIDEO_ID}/mqdefault.jpg  // 320×180
https://img.youtube.com/vi/{VIDEO_ID}/hqdefault.jpg  // 480×360
https://img.youtube.com/vi/{VIDEO_ID}/maxresdefault.jpg // max resolution

No API call needed — just the video ID. The question was: how do we get the video ID from our stored data?

For new projects, we store the normalized YouTube URL in r2_key (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fcJ4Y-uxCw), so extracting the ID is straightforward.

For old projects, the stored r2_key is the R2 object path of the downloaded video file (videos/{uuid}/video.mp4) — no video ID there. But old projects have a predictable title format: YouTube video (8fcJ4Y-uxCw). The ID is right there in the title.

This gave us a two-path function with a graceful fallback:

function getYoutubeThumbnail(project: Project): string | null {
  if (project.type !== "youtube") return null;

  // New projects: r2_key is the YouTube URL
  const fromKey = project.r2_key?.match(/[?&]v=([a-zA-Z0-9_-]{11})/)?.[1];
  if (fromKey) return `https://img.youtube.com/vi/${fromKey}/mqdefault.jpg`;

  // Old projects: r2_key is a storage path, but title has the ID
  const fromTitle = project.title.match(/\(([a-zA-Z0-9_-]{11})\)$/)?.[1];
  return fromTitle ? `https://img.youtube.com/vi/${fromTitle}/mqdefault.jpg` : null;
}

No migration. No backfill script. Every existing project gets thumbnails automatically.

Wiring it into the card

The project card uses Next.js <Image> with the YouTube thumbnail domain added to next.config.ts:

// next.config.ts
const nextConfig = {
  images: {
    remotePatterns: [{ protocol: "https", hostname: "img.youtube.com" }],
  },
};

The card component:

function YoutubeThumbnail({ project }: { project: Project }) {
  const src = getYoutubeThumbnail(project);
  if (!src) return null;
  return (
    <div className="relative w-full aspect-video">
      <Image
        src={src}
        alt=""
        fill
        className="object-cover"
        sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, (max-width: 1024px) 50vw, 33vw"
        unoptimized
      />
    </div>
  );
}

export default function ProjectCard({ project }: ProjectCardProps) {
  return (
    <div className="bg-gray-900 border border-gray-800 rounded-xl overflow-hidden flex flex-col">
      <YoutubeThumbnail project={project} />
      <div className="p-4 flex flex-col gap-3">
        {/* title, status, timestamp, actions */}
      </div>
    </div>
  );
}

unoptimized is set because YouTube's CDN already serves optimized images — running them through Next.js image optimization would be redundant.

The broader pattern

Before reaching for a migration or a new API integration, ask:

Is the data already in the database? The video ID was in the title all along.
Does the platform expose it for free? YouTube's oEmbed gives us the real title with no authentication.
Can the URL be derived deterministically? Thumbnail URLs follow a predictable pattern once you have the ID.

Data you already have, combined with free platform APIs and predictable URL structures, can cover a lot of ground before you need to store anything new.

We're building ClipCrafter — AI-powered video clip extraction for creators. If you found this useful, follow along for more engineering notes.

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