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Summarize YouTube videos and generate thumbnails using Anthropic and deAPI

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Created by: deAPI Team || deapi
deAPI Team

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Last update 7 hours ago

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Who is this for?

  • YouTube creators who want to speed up their post-production workflow
  • Content repurposers who turn videos into written summaries
  • Social media managers handling multiple YouTube channels
  • Anyone who needs quick, AI-generated thumbnails from video content

What problem does this solve?

Watching a full video to write a summary and then designing a matching thumbnail is tedious. This workflow does both automatically — transcribe, summarize, and generate a professional 1280x720 thumbnail — all from a single YouTube URL.

What this workflow does

  1. Takes a YouTube video URL as input
  2. Transcribes the full video using deAPI (Whisper Large V3)
  3. AI Agent analyzes the transcript, writes a concise summary, and uses the deAPI Prompt Booster tool to craft an optimized thumbnail image prompt
  4. Generates a 1280x720 landscape thumbnail using deAPI
  5. Uploads the thumbnail to Google Drive

Setup

Requirements

  • Self-hosted n8n instance (deAPI node is not yet available on n8n Cloud)
  • deAPI account for video transcription, prompt boosting, and image generation
  • Anthropic account for the AI Agent
  • Google Drive API access for file uploads

Installing the deAPI Node

  1. Go to Settings → Community Nodes
  2. Install n8n-nodes-deapi

Configuration

  1. Add your deAPI credentials (API key + webhook secret)
  2. Add your Anthropic credentials (API key)
  3. Add your Google Drive credentials (OAuth2)
  4. Set the target Google Drive folder ID in the Google Drive Upload node
  5. Ensure your n8n instance is on HTTPS

How to customize this workflow

  • Change the AI model: Swap Anthropic for OpenAI, Google Gemini, or any other LLM provider
  • Adjust the prompt style: Modify the AI Agent system message to target different thumbnail aesthetics (minimalist, bold text overlay, cinematic, etc.)
  • Change the output destination: Replace Google Drive with Dropbox, S3, Notion, or email delivery
  • Add a summary output: Insert a Google Docs or Notion node after the AI Agent to save the written summary alongside the thumbnail
  • Process in bulk: Replace the Manual Trigger with a Google Sheets trigger containing a list of YouTube URLs
  • Swap the trigger: Use a Form Trigger to let team members submit YouTube URLs through a web form
  • Other video platforms: The transcription node also supports Twitch VODs, X (Twitter), and Kick URLs