FREE · NO SIGNUP · NOTHING UPLOADED

Link straight to a thumbnail grade

Paste a video link. Get a URL that opens Thumbnail Autopsy with the grade already running.

Thumbnail Autopsy takes the video in a query parameter, so a link can carry it. Useful if you write about thumbnails and want readers to check their own, or if you keep grading the same channel and want a bookmark that skips the paste step. The measurement runs in the reader's browser, so you are not sending us their video and we are not storing which one they graded.

Video link or ID

Thumbnail preview
This is the image that gets graded. If it looks wrong here, the link points at the wrong video.
Direct link
Markdown
HTML link
Open the grade in a new tab

What the parameters do

Thumbnail Autopsy reads two query parameters on load. If either is present it fills the field and runs the grade immediately, so a link lands on the result rather than on an empty form.

ParameterTakesExample
vA YouTube video ID on its own/thumbnail-autopsy?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
urlA full video URL, including short and Shorts forms/thumbnail-autopsy?url=https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ

Both need URL-encoding when the value contains characters like & or ?. The builder above does that for you. There is no API key, no rate limit and no account, because there is no server doing the work: the page fetches the thumbnail and measures it in whichever browser opened the link.

What a reader actually sees

Six measurements, each printed next to the threshold it is compared against: whether the image survives being shrunk to feed size, whether the contrast holds up, whether the duration badge covers anything that matters, and how the tones clip. It does not estimate click-through rate, because that depends on the title, the audience and the topic rather than on the image. If you are linking to it in an article, that refusal is the part worth telling readers about.

Linking to the other tools

Two more pages take a link the same way. Thumbnail Grabber accepts ?url= for a video on YouTube, TikTok, Vimeo and others. Share Preview accepts a page URL and renders the card. Everything else on the site starts from a file on the reader's own device, so there is nothing meaningful to put in a link.

Common questions

Is this an API?
Not in the usual sense. It is a link that opens a page, and the work happens in whichever browser opens it. There is no endpoint that returns JSON, no key to request and no quota, because we run no server-side image processing at all. If you need programmatic grading, this is not it.
Do you track who clicks these links?
We see the pageview, the same as on any page. We do not receive the thumbnail, because the browser fetches and measures it locally, and we do not store which video was graded. A link you publish does not hand us a list of your readers' videos.
Will the link keep working?
The parameters are part of how the page already worked rather than something added for this, and the page is free with no account behind it, so there is nothing to expire. If the format ever has to change, the old form will keep redirecting.
Does it work with Shorts, youtu.be and live URLs?
Yes. The builder pulls the ID out of watch links, youtu.be short links, /shorts/ links, /live/ links and /embed/ links, and a bare ID works too. If it cannot find an eleven-character ID it says so, rather than building a link that fails later on someone else's site.
Can I link to a grade of an image that is not on YouTube?
Not by link. The parameters carry a video reference, and anything else has to be a file the reader picks on the Autopsy page itself. That is a direct consequence of never uploading anything: there is no server-side copy for a link to point at.
Why does the preview thumbnail sometimes look lower quality?
The preview requests the maximum-resolution thumbnail and falls back to a smaller one when a video has no high-resolution version, which is common on older or unlisted uploads. The grade itself uses the best image available and states the size it measured.

Related Tools

Thumbnail Autopsy Thumbnail Grabber Share Preview Image Editor All Creator Tools