OCR on the thumbnail is sometimes good enough for me since I’ll remember the teaser blurb that they put in the image but leave out of the title. So the LLM description service can handle that and maybe it’ll add in “two people standing in front of a boat” and something will hit in a search.

But I’ve actually started pulling in more than just the thumbnail. With the YouTube API I’m pulling in the description and all the tagging and then I use Haiku to do some categorization and auto tagging based on all of that info.

The problem with fetching transcripts is that YouTube likes to soft ban you if you start getting a lot of them at once. At one point I even triggered it just from manually fetching a dozen about ten seconds apart from each other. So now I just leave the transcripts for informational videos where I don’t want to watch the whole thing.