YouTube Video ID Finder

This tool pulls the 11-character video ID out of a YouTube link. The ID is what developers pass to the YouTube Data API, what embed and thumbnail addresses are built from, and a handy unique key when you track videos in a spreadsheet or content calendar.

What a video ID is

Every YouTube video has an ID of exactly 11 characters taken from 64 symbols: upper and lower case letters, digits, the hyphen and the underscore. That is the same URL-safe alphabet defined for Base64url encoding in RFC 4648, which is why the ID can sit in a web address without escaping. IDs are case-sensitive, so Xy12Ab_cD-9 and xy12ab_cd-9 would be two different videos. The ID never changes, even if the title, description or thumbnail does.

Where the ID sits in each link format

Paste any of these and press Get result to see Video ID: Xy12Ab_cD-9. Whatever follows the ID, such as &t=42s, ?si=… or &list=…, is ignored. Mobile m.youtube.com and YouTube Music watch links work too, and pasting a bare 11-character ID simply returns it. Links copied with the Share button in the YouTube app use the short form with an si= parameter on the end; the ID is the part between youtu.be/ and the question mark, and that is what the tool returns. The extraction happens in your browser.

Links it cannot read

• Watch links where v= is not the first parameter, such as watch?app=desktop&v=…. Copy the 11 characters after v= by hand, or delete the parameter in front of it and paste again.
• Privacy-mode embeds from youtube-nocookie.com and old /v/ links.
• Playlist and channel links, which contain no single video ID. For channels, use the channel ID finder.

In these cases the tool says it could not find a video ID. It checks the format only, so a correctly shaped ID for a deleted or private video is still returned.

What you can build from an ID

• Clean links: https://youtu.be/ plus the ID gives a short link without tracking parameters.
• Thumbnails: https://img.youtube.com/vi/ID/hqdefault.jpg returns the video's 480 × 360 thumbnail; the thumbnail downloader shows all four sizes.
• API requests: the Data API's videos.list method takes the ID in its id parameter, up to 50 IDs separated by commas in one call.
• Links to a moment: adding ?t= and a number of seconds to the short link starts playback at that point, which the timestamp link generator explains in more detail.
• Spreadsheet tracking: storing the ID rather than the full URL keeps a video log tidy and makes duplicate checks reliable.