YouTube Video ID Extractor

Every YouTube video has an 11-character ID hidden in its link. You need it to build thumbnail URLs, embed codes, API requests and clean spreadsheets – but links come in a dozen formats, often with tracking codes stuck on the end. This extractor finds the ID in any link in a split second, and it works for one link or a few hundred at once.

How to use the Video ID Extractor

1. Paste your links into the box – one per line, or simply a block of text that contains links.
2. The tool shows every video it found with its video ID, a clean watch link and an HD thumbnail link.
3. Click Copy IDs for a plain list, or Copy as CSV to paste straight into Google Sheets or Excel with separate columns.

Duplicates are removed automatically, so pasting the same video three times gives you one row.

Every link format, one answer

The si= code YouTube adds when you tap Share only tracks who shared the link. It is not part of the ID and is safe to drop.

How to recognise a real video ID

• It is exactly 11 characters long.
• It only uses A–Z, a–z, 0–9, the hyphen (-) and the underscore (_).
• It is case-sensitive: dQw4w9WgXcQ and DQW4W9WGXCQ are different videos.
• The last character is always one of 16 values (A, E, I, M, Q, U, Y, c, g, k, o, s, w, 0, 4, 8). This comes from how YouTube encodes the ID, and it is a quick way to spot a typo.

Things that look similar but are not video IDs: channel IDs start with UC and have 24 characters, and playlist IDs usually start with PL and are 34 characters long.

What people use video IDs for

• Thumbnails. https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ID/maxresdefault.jpg gives the 1280×720 image. Our thumbnail URL guide lists every size.
• Embeds. Use the ID in the embed code generator to add the video to a website with a start time or privacy mode.
• Timestamp links. Combine the ID with a time using the timestamp link generator.
• Research spreadsheets. Marketers and teachers collect links from many sources. Converting them to IDs removes duplicates that differ only in tracking codes.
• YouTube Data API. Most API calls (statistics, comments, captions) need the ID, not the full link.

Doing it in Google Sheets instead

For a single column of links you can also use a formula. Put a link in A2 and this in B2:

=REGEXEXTRACT(A2, "(?:v=|youtu\.be/|shorts/|embed/|live/)([A-Za-z0-9_-]{11})")

It works for the common formats but fails on text that has no link, so for messy lists the extractor is faster.

Troubleshooting

• Nothing found? Check that the text contains a video link, not a channel or playlist link.
• Wrong ID? If a link was cut off while copying, the ID may be shorter than 11 characters. Copy the link again from the Share button.
• Private or deleted videos still have IDs, but their thumbnails show a grey placeholder.

Want to find an ID by hand on a phone or computer? Our step-by-step guide on how to find a YouTube video ID shows where it appears in the app, the browser and YouTube Studio.