---
title: "Vumbnail | Sam Carlton"
source: "https://samcarlton.com/portfolio/vumbnail/"
---

# Vumbnail

June 2026

> It actually started out as a Stack Overflow question.

Someone asked how to pull a thumbnail straight from a Vimeo video — “there was a bunch of answers; none of them were really great, none of them were simple.” So I figured out a clean way to do it, bought vumbnail.com, and put up a demo plus the code so people could test it and copy it themselves. Today it turns any YouTube or Vimeo URL into a fast, embeddable thumbnail — billed as “Simple Video Thumbnails for Frontend Developers.”

## Links

-   **Site:** [vumbnail.com](https://vumbnail.com/)
-   **GitHub:** [ThatGuySam/vumbnail](https://github.com/ThatGuySam/vumbnail)

## Highlights

-   **Started as a Stack Overflow answer** — “I made a repo where you can try this out… so people could copy the code.”
-   **Runs at real scale** — over the last 30 days it served roughly 16 million unique visitors and 120 million requests a month.
-   **Moved to Cloudflare to scale** — “I finally started migrating it fully over to Cloudflare so it could scale.”
-   **One-line integration** — paste a video URL, get a ready-to-embed thumbnail URL back, cached on the CDN.

## How It’s Built

-   **App & parsing** — an Astro frontend with video-URL parsing (`js-video-url-parser`, ytdl-core) and typed validation via Zod.
-   **Image pipeline** — a custom Rust image library (Photon) compiled to WebAssembly handles the thumbnail transforms.
-   **Infrastructure** — migrated from Vercel to Cloudflare Workers with R2 storage so it can scale; long CDN cache lifetimes on resolved thumbnails.
-   **Ops & tooling** — Vitest, ESLint, TypeScript, and pnpm, with a one-click deploy flow documented in the README.

## Screenshots

![Vumbnail desktop tool resolving a video thumbnail](/project-screenshots/vumbnail/vumbnail-desktop.png)

Paste a video URL and Vumbnail returns an embeddable, CDN-cached thumbnail.

![Vumbnail mobile page](/project-screenshots/vumbnail/vumbnail-mobile.png)

Mobile view of the public Vumbnail tool.