thumbup 👍

thumbup is a command-line video thumbnails generator written in Python.

Getting thumbup

You'll need ffmpeg before you can use thumbup, which can be installed by

# on macOS
brew install ffmpeg

# on ubuntu (>= 14.04)
sudo apt-get install -y \
  libavformat-dev libavcodec-dev libavdevice-dev \
  libavutil-dev libswscale-dev libavresample-dev libavfilter-dev

ffmpeg is also widely available for many other distros. Please refer to the official website https://www.ffmpeg.org.

thumbup can be installed from pip by

pip install thumbup

Usage

To generate thumbnails for video files file1 and file2, simply use

thumbup file1 file2

The above will create file1.jpg and file2.jpg in the same directory as the video files.

To generate thumbnails for all video files in directory dir, use -r option. thumbup will recursively go through every video in directory dir and generate thumbnails next to them.

thumbup -r dir

Full help message for more control:

usage: thumbup.py [-h] [-v] [-r] [-f] [-o OFFSET] [-s X] FILE [FILE ...]

thumbup video thumbnail generator vv1.5.1

positional arguments:
  FILE                  one or more video files or directories (with -r)

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -v, --verbose         logging more stuff
  -r, --rec             recursively go into all dirs
  -f, --force           force overwrite existing thumbnails
  -o OFFSET, --offset OFFSET
                        skip OFFSET (hh:mm:ss.ms or second) from the beginning
  -s X, --suffix X      add suffix to the output filename, input.mp4 ->
                        inputX.jpg