Watch Later Tidy for YouTube™ by Dominic Lam

Watch Later Tidy for YouTube™ searches your Watch Later, your Liked videos and every playlist in your library as you type, by title, channel or the uploader's own tags, across thousands of saved videos. Send what you find to NotebookLM (now called Gemini Notebook) as sources, or bulk delete, remove likes in bulk, filter by channel or topic, group the grid by channel, sort by duration, views or upload date, reorder, sync every playlist at once, download transcripts in bulk, and escape the 5,000-video limit. Everything in the feature list below is free; an optional paid tier, TidyWL Pro, adds clean-up rules, undo and a watch-list builder on top of it. Your playlist is fetched with your own YouTube session and cached on your device — the extension reports back only a random install ID and usage counts, never which videos, plus your licence key if you buy Pro. 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 list stops being worth keeping.

Then one day you hit the 5,000-video limit. YouTube freezes you out — nothing new until you dig through the pile and start deleting. One. Video. At. A. Time.

Your Liked videos list is worse — years long, no limit, and no way through it at all. The playlists you made yourself get exactly the tools YouTube gives Watch Later: none.

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 whole playlist broken down by channel or topic (like a storage manager for your queue), filter, sort, reorder and bulk-delete. 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 Watch Later Tidy icon in Firefox's toolbar (pin it from the extensions 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, channel or tag to find one video, or browse by channel or topic, filter, sort, select, bulk-delete, reorder, or export.
7. Switch between Watch Later, Liked videos and any playlist in your library from the header at any time — each keeps its own cache. Tick several and you see them merged.

No account. No sign-in. No setup. No permissions beyond your current YouTube session.

✨ NEW IN v2.2.0

📚 Take a playlist you saved from someone else off your library, with the same trash button as your own. The playlist itself is untouched and its owner is not told.
⚡ Faster bulk delete and copy: up to 100 deletions or 200 additions per request. In a test, 500 videos were copied in about 6 seconds and deleted in under 5.
📋 After copying or moving you see where the videos came from and went, how many were added or skipped, and how long it took.
🎬 The Shorts filter asks YouTube which videos are Shorts, so it finds Shorts up to three minutes long and leaves out ordinary short videos.
💎 Buy Pro and it switches on by itself in that browser, with no key to paste.
🐛 Fixed: Retry after a delete or move with errors now picks up the videos that failed; deleting one video from its card counts toward your total; a playlist you emptied can still be deleted; clearer white-on-blue text in the dark theme.

💎 WHAT TIDYWL PRO ADDS

Pro is an optional subscription, available from https://tidywl.com/pro/.

🧹 Three clean-up rules — remove dead entries, archive finished videos, and a monthly rule that holds your list at a size.
📌 Pin a video and nothing removes it, rules included.
👁 See and deselect the exact list before any bulk delete or unlike.
↩ Undo deletions, with 90 days of history on the device that made them — 10,000 records by default, and you can raise the limit.
🔖 Saved views — name a filter set, reapply it in one click.
🕒 Lineup — a ranked watch list from your own saves, fitted to the time you have.
💬 Feature requests and support answered first.

One key works on up to three devices — the About panel shows which devices are using it and lets you free one up. There is no free trial: the free tier is how you try Watch Later Tidy, and any Pro charge can be refunded in full within 14 days. Cancel any time from the same panel; it opens your own billing portal. Current pricing, the refund policy and the terms: https://tidywl.com/pro/

🛠 FULL FEATURE LIST (free)

🔍 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, sent to YouTube in groups, with live progress, a stop button and Retry for any that fail.
❤ Watch Later, Liked videos and every playlist in your library in one dashboard — pick one, or tick several and see them merged: one card per video, a chip for each playlist it's in, and Copy, Move and Delete across them. Playlists saved from other people can be searched and copied from.
🔄 Sync every ticked playlist in one run, or one at a time.
🗑 Delete a playlist you own, or take one you saved off your library, 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. Filter to a topic, or hide ones you don't want to see.
🔎 Search the sidebar's channel and topic lists as you type.
🎚 Filter by watched status (with an adjustable progress threshold), availability, or duration (presets or a custom min/max).
📋 Grid of cards or a compact list, in the middle of the page or filling the whole window.
🔃 Sort by playlist order, duration, published date, views or title A–Z, or group the grid by channel with a heading you can fold for each one.
📝 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 menus, 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. No API key, no OAuth, no account setup. Pro is unlocked by a licence key you paste in, not by signing in.

Do I have to pay for anything?
No. Every feature in the list above is free. Pro is an optional subscription that adds clean-up rules, Pin, operations preview, undo, saved views and the Lineup on top of it. Nothing that was free before v2.0.0 has moved behind the paywall.

What happens if my Pro subscription ends?
The paid features stop and the free extension carries on exactly as before. Your playlists, caches, saved views and delete history stay on your device and are not deleted, but saved views and the delete history can't be opened again until you resubscribe. Pinned videos stay protected, and you can still unpin them. If your browser can't reach our server for a while, Pro keeps working for 14 days before it drops back to free.

Does it work on my own playlists?
Yes. Open the Playlists menu in the dashboard header and click any playlist in your library, or tick several to see them merged. Playlists you saved from other people can be searched, sorted, copied from and taken off your library, but not changed: only their owner can remove or reorder their videos.

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 the title, the channel name and the uploader's tags as you type, across your entire playlist, so you can find a video by what it's about, not just what it's called. If you don't remember which playlist it's in, tick every playlist and search them all at once.

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 tag, by filter, or with Cmd/Ctrl+A — and press Delete. Videos go to YouTube up to 100 at a time: in a test, 500 were deleted in under five seconds.

Can I undo a deletion?
On the free tier, no — deletions are permanent on YouTube's side, so export first if you want a snapshot. Pro remembers what you deleted for 90 days on the device that deleted it, up to 10,000 records by default, and can put it back, at the top of the playlist. It cannot undo a removed like: YouTube treats that as un-liking, not as a playlist edit.

Does it sync across devices?
No. The cached playlist lives in your browser's local storage. A Pro licence does roam — it is stored in the browser's synced settings — but your playlists, saved views and delete history do not.

🔒 PRIVACY

Your playlist stays on your device. No login, no account, no servers holding your videos. No analytics or advertising library runs in the extension and nothing is sold or shared; what it does send is a short report of usage counts, listed below.

What does go to tidywl.com:
- Requests for a public config file and a notices file, with no identifiers and no payload, so the extension survives YouTube changing its page layout and can show you notices. A notice is words and links only.
- Since v1.6.0, a random install identifier (not linked to you or your Google account) and your lifetime counts — videos deleted, likes removed, videos moved, bulk operations run, Lineups built and saved, days you opened the dashboard, the size of your Watch Later, whether each removal took the whole list or part of it, how often a free install opens the Pro plans and from where, notices shown and clicked, and your browser — sent whenever one of them changes. Never a title, a video ID, a channel or a timestamp. On Firefox this is sent only if you allow technical and interaction data; Firefox's own add-on settings control it. Records not updated for 12 months are deleted. Counts include deletions made before v1.6.0. Policy: https://tidywl.com/privacy/
- Since v2.0.0, and only if you buy Pro: your licence key (or the Transaction ID from your receipt, to recover a lost key) and the device name you type when you activate it, so we can check the key is valid and show you which devices are using it. Nothing about your playlists or your Google account goes with it. Payment is handled by Paddle, our merchant of record, in their checkout on the tidywl.com pricing page — the extension never sees your card details, and we never receive them.

The Lineup reads your YouTube watch history and your subscriptions to rank your saved videos. That reading happens on your device with your own YouTube session, and none of it is sent to us or to anyone else.

"Send to Gemini Notebook" is the one flow that sends video links somewhere else: to Google's Gemini Notebook, using your own Google session, when you press it.

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.

⚠ HONEST LIMITATIONS

• Requires being signed in to YouTube in this browser.
• The free tier has no undo: deletions and removed likes are permanent. Pro's undo covers deletions only, for 90 days, and only on the device that made them — it is not a cloud backup and it cannot restore a removed like. It keeps 10,000 records unless you raise the limit; past the limit, the oldest drop off.
• Removing a like is not a playlist edit — YouTube treats it as un-liking, which can affect your recommendations.
• Reorder is hidden on Liked videos — YouTube orders that list by when you liked things. Move works there: it adds the video to your chosen playlist and removes your like.
• Playlists you saved from other people can be searched and copied from, but not cleaned up or reordered — only their owner can change them.
• A merged view of several playlists can't be reordered, and deleting there removes the video from every ticked playlist — untick to one playlist to delete from just that one.
• Deleting a playlist is permanent. The videos stay on YouTube; the playlist does not.
• Usage counts go to tidywl.com if you allow technical and interaction data in Firefox's add-on settings (see Privacy).
• Pro's monthly clean-up rule only runs when your YouTube playlist is sorted by date added. If it isn't, the rule says so and does nothing rather than guessing.
• The Lineup needs YouTube to be recording your watch history to rank by taste. With history paused it picks by length and age only.
• Restoring a deleted video, or one from the archive, puts it at the top of the playlist. YouTube offers no way to put it back where it was.
• Transcript download opens a small visible window and works through videos one at a time, around three seconds each, in whichever language YouTube shows by default.
• "Playlist order" sort reflects current position, not the date you added the video. YouTube doesn't expose added-date on web.
• Uses YouTube's internal, undocumented API. It could break if YouTube changes their internals; a remote config lets many breakages be patched without an extension update.

💬 COMMUNITY

Join the Discord to report bugs, request features, or just say hi: https://discord.gg/sTvjfp4sCk

Built by an indie developer who hit the 5,000-video limit and had enough. Independent and not affiliated with YouTube or Google. YouTube is a trademark of Google LLC. 🚀