Grab a thumbnail of a private (but embeddable) Vimeo video

grab_vimeo_thumbnail.php

<?php
/**
 * Grab the url of a publicly embeddable video hosted on vimeo
 * @param  str $video_url The "embed" url of a video
 * @return str            The url of the thumbnail, or false if there's an error
 */
function grab_vimeo_thumbnail($vimeo_url){
    if( !$vimeo_url ) return false;

    $data = json_decode( file_get_contents( 'http://vimeo.com/api/oembed.json?url=' . $vimeo_url ) );

    if( !$data ) return false;

    return $data->thumbnail_url;
}

For completeness, would it be this in PHP?

...
return explode($data->thumbnail_url, '_')[0]."_1920x1080";

unfortunately the PHP object only contains the one thumbnail_url, which is generally 640x360.

example https://vimeo.com/api/oembed.json?url=https://vimeo.com/311468941 returns

{"type":"video","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Vimeo","provider_url":"https:\/\/vimeo.com\/","title":"olson kundig | space needle century project | seattle","author_name":"nic lehoux","author_url":"https:\/\/vimeo.com\/niclehoux","is_plus":"1","account_type":"plus","html":"<iframe src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/311468941?h=674979c981&amp;app_id=122963\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen title=\"olson kundig | space needle century project | seattle\"><\/iframe>","width":640,"height":360,"duration":158,"description":"","thumbnail_url":"https:\/\/i.vimeocdn.com\/video\/752300323-c9b7699f9dc14ec1484a39edca5506c5bf745e081cdab9d08fd9fc9c841d1183-d_640","thumbnail_width":640,"thumbnail_height":360,"thumbnail_url_with_play_button":"https:\/\/i.vimeocdn.com\/filter\/overlay?src0=https%3A%2F%2Fi.vimeocdn.com%2Fvideo%2F752300323-c9b7699f9dc14ec1484a39edca5506c5bf745e081cdab9d08fd9fc9c841d1183-d_640&src1=http%3A%2F%2Ff.vimeocdn.com%2Fp%2Fimages%2Fcrawler_play.png","upload_date":"2019-01-15 10:03:56","video_id":311468941,"uri":"\/videos\/311468941"}

getting the 1080p image is still possible via JS, but delivering via PHP would be ideal! welcome any other takes here...

Hey @shaunkardinal, have a look at my last comment: you can use PHP to replace the ..._640 at the end of thumbnail_url with any crop you like, eg _1920x1080. It's undocumented, but works.

oh! i see the issue, a classic—the example code you gave had the separator/string mixed up! thanks again @monowales 🙏

return explode('_', $data->thumbnail_url)[0].'_1920x1080';

I just removed the resolution entirely and it give me the highest resolution image
return explode('_', $data->thumbnail_url)[0]