yenjay

Have you seen the oEmbed format: https://abdus.dev/posts/youtube-oembed/ ?

I was really happy when I discovered it when I was researching how Wagtail CMS implements the embedded content previews.

For your example it returns:

  "thumbnail_url": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/bJ7mTY9501c/hqdefault.jpg",

The file is smaller but shows up correctly!