YouTube Watch Later Tidy

Bulk delete, filter, sort, and reorder your YouTube Watch Later and playlists. Escape the 5000-video limit. Runs in your browser.

YouTube Watch Later Tidy is a Chrome extension for searching and managing your YouTube Watch Later, your Liked videos, and the playlists you created. Search thousands of saved videos by title, channel or the uploader's own tags, bulk delete, remove likes in bulk, filter by channel or topic, sort by duration, views or upload date, reorder, sync every playlist at once, download transcripts in bulk, and escape the 5,000-video limit. Your YouTube data never leaves your browser unless you send it somewhere yourself; the only thing the extension reports back is a random install ID and how many videos you've cleaned up — never which ones. No account, no sign-in. 📋 Your YouTube Watch Later playlist is a graveyard. Videos saved months or years ago. Channels you forgot you followed. A queue so long you stopped trusting it. 🔍 You know you saved that video. You just can't find it again. Scrolling is the only tool you have — thousands of thumbnails, loading a screen at a time, hunting for one title you half-remember. Give up often enough and the whole list stops being worth keeping. Then one day, you hit the 5,000-video limit. YouTube freezes you out. Can't save anything new until you dig through the pile and start deleting. One. Video. At. A. Time. Your Liked videos list is worse — it goes back years, it has no limit, and YouTube gives you no way through it at all. And the playlists you made yourself get exactly the same tools YouTube gives Watch Later: none. YouTube Watch Later Tidy fixes all of it. Open a dashboard over your YouTube page, type a few letters to find any video instantly, see your entire playlist broken down by channel or by topic (like a storage manager for your queue), filter, sort, reorder, and bulk-delete. Done in minutes instead of hours. 🚀 HOW IT WORKS 1. Install the extension. 2. Go to youtube.com/playlist?list=WL (your Watch Later page) — or your Liked videos, or any playlist you own. 3. Click the YouTube Watch Later Tidy icon in the top-right corner of Chrome (pin it from the puzzle-piece menu if you don't see it). 4. Click "Open Dashboard". 5. Hit Sync and wait for the progress counter to finish. 6. Search by title or channel to find one video, or browse by channel or by topic, filter, sort, select, bulk-delete, reorder, or export. 7. Switch between Watch Later, Liked videos and any of your own playlists from the header at any time — each keeps its own cache and sync time. Tick several and you see them merged. No account. No setup. No permissions beyond your current YouTube session. Completely free. ✨ NEW IN v1.6.0 🏷️ Video tags: every video now shows the tags its uploader gave it — the keywords YouTube stores but never shows you, plus hashtags from the description — as chips on the card, and search matches them. Find a video by what it's about when you can't remember a word of its title. It is also what makes search work on a playlist that isn't in English: tags are usually written in both the video's language and yours. Click a tag to filter by it, click it again to drop it, and stack several to narrow — "jazz" plus "piano" gives you the videos carrying both. A card with more tags than fit shows a +N chip; hover it for the full list, every one clickable. Tags load with each sync, or on demand from the # button. 📂 Your own playlists: the dashboard header now has a Playlists menu, drawn like YouTube's own "Save to…" panel — thumbnail, title, privacy — listing Watch Later, Liked videos and every playlist you've created, with a search box for when there are dozens. Click one and it opens in the same dashboard with everything Watch Later gets: search, channel and topic breakdowns, filters, sorting, bulk delete, reorder, move and copy, export, transcripts. Each playlist keeps its own cache and sync time. Opening the dashboard on a playlist page picks that playlist automatically, and picking one you've never synced syncs it without asking. ☑️ Tick several at once: every row in the menu has a checkbox (or press Space, or shift-click for a range; Select all sits at the top). Tick two or more and the dashboard shows them merged — one card per video, with a chip for each playlist it's in, so a video that's in three playlists shows three chips and "which playlist did I put that in?" finally has an answer. Search matches playlist names too. From a merged view you can Copy, and Move takes the video out of every ticked playlist it's in. Delete and reorder need a single playlist — untick down to one. Sync on a merged view syncs every ticked playlist, one after another, with a Stop button. 🗑️ Delete a playlist: a trash icon next to each playlist you own, in the menu and in the toolbar when that playlist is open. It asks by name. The playlist itself is deleted from YouTube, its videos stay on YouTube, and it cannot be undone. Never offered on Watch Later or Liked videos. 📁 Move from Liked videos: Move to playlist now works on the Liked videos tab — the video is added to the playlist you chose and your like is removed. Reorder stays off there, because YouTube orders that list by when you liked things. 📐 A new layout: the stat cards and the channel / topic breakdowns now live in a left sidebar you can collapse to get the whole width for your videos; search is a magnifier in the toolbar; the panel is wider. Shift-click works on the video checkboxes now, not only on the cards. 📊 Usage counts, disclosed plainly: starting with this version, the extension sends tidywl.com a random install identifier and your lifetime counts — videos deleted, likes removed, videos moved, bulk operations run, the size of your Watch Later, and which browser you're on. Never which videos, never your playlist, never your account. Details in the Privacy section below and at https://tidywl.com/privacy/ 🛠️ FULL FEATURE LIST 🔍 Search your whole playlist by title, channel or tag, as you type. Works across thousands of videos without scrolling. 🏷️ The uploader's own tags on every card, clickable as filters — stack several to narrow, hover +N for the rest. 🗑️ Bulk delete selected videos with live progress and a stop button. ❤️ Watch Later, Liked videos and every playlist you own, in one dashboard — pick one, or tick several and see them merged. 🗂️ Merged view of any playlists you tick: one card per video, a chip for each playlist it's in, search across all of them, Copy and Move between them. 🔄 Sync every ticked playlist in one run, or one at a time. 🗑️ Delete a playlist you own, by name, from the menu. 💔 Remove likes in bulk, through the same flow as deletion. 📊 A sidebar with channel breakdown bars, sorted by count, that collapses out of the way. 🏷️ By Topic view: local keyword clustering, no API calls, no data sent. Filter to a topic, or hide topics you don't want to see. 🎚️ Filter by watched status (with an adjustable progress threshold), availability, or duration (preset buckets or a custom min/max range). 🔃 Sort by playlist order (top/bottom first), duration (longest/shortest), published date (newest/oldest), views (most/fewest), channel A–Z, or title A–Z. 📝 Download transcripts for one video or hundreds, as timestamped text files named after the video. 📓 Send selected videos to Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM) as sources. 📁 Move or copy videos to another playlist. Create new playlists inline (Private / Unlisted / Public). ↕️ Reorder via Move to Top, Move to Bottom, or drag-and-drop (single or multi-select). 🔖 Per-video 3-dot menu: Move to Top, Move to Bottom, Open in new tab, Copy URL, Download transcript, Remove. 💾 Export to JSON or CSV (UTF-8 BOM, handles non-Latin titles correctly). 👤 Multi-account aware: auto-detects your logged-in Google account. Brand channels supported. ⌨️ Keyboard shortcuts: Cmd/Ctrl+A (select all), Delete/Backspace (delete selected), Esc (close or deselect). 🌗 Light and dark theme following your browser's setting. WCAG-AA contrast in dark mode. ♿ Accessibility: keyboard navigation on dropdowns and the Playlists menu, ARIA labels, prefers-reduced-motion respected. ❓ FAQ Does it need a YouTube API key or OAuth login? No. It uses the same internal endpoints your browser already calls when you use YouTube. No API key, no OAuth, no account setup. Is my data sent anywhere? Your YouTube data — titles, video IDs, channels, your playlists, your account — never leaves your browser. Everything in the dashboard is fetched from YouTube with your own session and cached locally. Two small things do go to tidywl.com. One is a request for a public config file, with no identifiers and no payload, so the extension can survive YouTube changing its page layout. The other, since v1.6.0: each install carries a random identifier that is not linked to you or your Google account, and whenever one of your lifetime counts changes — after you delete, unlike or move videos, or sync — the extension sends that identifier and the counts: videos deleted, likes removed, videos moved, bulk operations run, the size of your Watch Later, and whether you're on Chrome or Firefox. Never which videos, never your playlist. There is no setting in the extension to turn this off on Chrome; uninstalling stops it. Records not updated for 12 months are deleted. Counts include deletions you made before this version. The full policy is at https://tidywl.com/privacy/ The one flow you trigger yourself: if you use "Send to Gemini Notebook", your chosen video links go to Google's Gemini Notebook using your own Google session — because that is the point of the feature. Does it work on my own playlists? Yes, as of v1.6.0. Open the Playlists menu in the dashboard header and click any playlist you created; it gets the same search, breakdowns, filters, sorting, bulk delete, reorder, move, export and transcript tools as Watch Later. Tick the checkboxes on two or more rows instead and you get them merged: one card per video, a chip for each playlist it's in, Copy and Move across them, and Sync runs through every ticked playlist. You can also delete a playlist you own from the menu — it asks by name, and the videos stay on YouTube. Favorites works too — open the dashboard on its page. Two playlist kinds are cleanup-only: Favorites, and playlists you don't own but have saved. YouTube serves those in a format without the per-item handle that reordering needs, so you can search and delete there but not reorder. How do I find a specific video in my Watch Later? Open the dashboard, hit Sync once, then click the magnifier in the toolbar and type. It matches against both the video title and the channel name as you type, across your entire playlist, however long it is. You can also narrow by channel, by topic, by duration, or by how much of it you've already watched, and combine those with the search. If you don't remember which playlist you put it in, tick every playlist in the menu (Select all) and search everything at once — the chips on each card tell you where it lives. How do I bulk-remove likes? Open the dashboard, switch to Liked videos in the header, hit Sync, then select the videos you want and press "Remove likes". They're removed one at a time, same as deletion, with progress and a Stop button. Be aware that YouTube uses your likes to shape recommendations, so removing them can change what it suggests. What does the Watched filter actually mean? "Watched" means started — any video YouTube has recorded progress on. That's why the slider exists: set it to 75 and you only get videos you're at least three-quarters through. "Unwatched" means never started, and it ignores the slider, so with the slider at 75 a video you left at 50% appears in neither list. How does bulk transcript download work? Select the videos you want, click Download Transcripts, and you get one text file per video in a "TidyWL transcripts" folder. TidyWL first asks YouTube which of your videos have captions at all, so videos without them are reported rather than silently skipped. It then opens one small window and works through the rest, roughly three seconds per video, and closes it when finished. Leave that window on top while it runs — YouTube only builds transcripts in a visible window. Which videos can I get transcripts for? Any video with captions, either creator-provided or auto-generated. Videos with captions disabled, most live streams, and some Shorts have no transcript to fetch. The summary at the end lists exactly which videos were skipped and why, so you're never left guessing. Why can I only add 5,000 videos to Watch Later? YouTube caps every playlist, including Watch Later, at 5,000 items. Once you hit the limit, adding more fails silently. The only fix is to delete older ones. This extension makes that possible without losing your afternoon. How do I bulk-delete videos from YouTube Watch Later? Install the extension, go to your Watch Later page, click "Open Dashboard", hit Sync, then select videos (individually, by channel, by topic, by filter, or with Cmd/Ctrl+A) and press Delete. YouTube's API requires sequential deletion, so large batches take a few seconds. How does the By Topic grouping work? It scans the titles of videos in your cached playlist and clusters them by recurring keywords (e.g. "recipe", "react", "interview"). Each video is assigned to its single strongest keyword, and topics with fewer than 3 videos are excluded to avoid noise. It runs 100% locally: no API calls, no external service, no data sent anywhere. Why does my video count differ from what YouTube shows? YouTube hides videos from its own playlist API when they are deleted, set to private, region-locked, copyright-blocked, from an expired livestream, from a suspended channel, or age-restricted. The dashboard shows you the exact gap and explains each reason. Does it work on brand channels or "Page" accounts? Yes, as of v1.2.0. Sync, delete, and reorder all work correctly on brand-channel Watch Later playlists. Syncing several ticked playlists at once is the one thing a brand channel can't do — YouTube's API only shows the main account's playlists there — so on a brand channel you sync the playlist you're on. Can I undo a deletion? No. Deletions are permanent on YouTube's side. Confirm before you delete. Use Export first if you want a snapshot. Does it sync across devices? No. The cached playlist lives in your browser's local storage. Open the extension on another device, hit Sync, and you get a fresh pull from YouTube. Will it break if YouTube changes their API? Possibly. This extension piggybacks on YouTube's internal endpoints, which can change without notice. A remote config system lets many breakages be patched without forcing an extension update, which adds real resilience. Larger breakages will still require an update. Everything else stays local. Two optional permissions are requested only at the moment you first use the feature that needs them, never at install: - Gemini Notebook access, so the videos you pick can be added as sources. - Saving downloads, so transcripts can be written to your Downloads folder. Decline either one and the rest of the extension carries on working normally. 💬 COMMUNITY Join the Discord to report bugs, request features, or just say hi: https://discord.gg/natc623GhX Built by an indie developer who hit the 5,000-video limit and had enough. Independent and not affiliated with YouTube or Google. 🚀