create thumbnails of Vimeo videos programmatically
You you can use the Vimeo Simple API to get the video thumbnails.

There is a fantastic write up here on stackexchange so I won't reinvent the wheel, but for a quick re-cap you can use the following code (thank you @Fluffy from link above.)

&lt;?php

//Video ID - Easy to find in URL (example ID below)
$video_id = (int) 6271487;

//Format you would like returned. (Can be php, xml or json)
$format = (string) 'php';

//Build request URL
$request_URL = "http://vimeo.com/api/v2/video/$video_id.$format";

//Get data and unserialize
$response = unserialize(file_get_contents($request_URL"));

//Echo's url to image.
echo $response[0]['thumbnail_medium'];  

?&gt;


Optionally, check out the Vimeo Advanced API method: vimeo.videos.getThumbnailUrls