YouTube Playlist Exporter

Tired of videos disappearing from your YouTube playlists, without leaving you the option to know what was there before?

Fear not! For this CLI will have you covered

This CLI allows exporting data about videos in your playlist to local files, that can be used as a backup in case videos from the playlist become private/get deleted.

If the CLI runs in a directory which contains output files from a previous run (with the same parameters), it will automatically detect differences in the specified playlist, and export them to files as well.

Installation

This CLI requires Python 3.10+ to run. It is published to PyPI and can be installed with pip using:

pip install youtube-playlist-exporter

Usage

1. Get a YouTube API Key. To do so, you can follow the instructions in this guide (this only needs to be done once for all future CLI runs)
2. If your playlist is private, see the next section for additional, more advanced setup that you need to perform after creating the API Key
3. Retrieve the YouTube ID of the playlist you want to create a backup for. This can be done in several ways. One of them is by navigating to the playlist's main YouTube page, and copying the text after "...list=" in the URL
4. If you didn't do so already, install the CLI (see installation)
5. Run the CLI using either the ype or youtube-playlist-export commands (full details on the CLI syntax are provided by running with the --help flag)
6. Several .csv files (tables which can be opened with Excel/imported to Google Sheets etc.) will be generated by the script in the output directory (<PLAYLIST_NAME> will be replaced with the name provided as an argument to the CLI):
   • YouTube-<PLAYLIST_NAME>-items.csv: contains the current details of all the videos in the playlist
   • YouTube-<PLAYLIST_NAME>-items-backup.csv: if an ...items.csv file existed in the output directory before running the script, this file will be a backup for it (in case something went wrong with running the script etc.)
   • YouTube-<PLAYLIST_NAME>-diff.csv: if an ...items.csv file existed in the output directory before running the script, this file will contain information about videos whose title changed. This can help detect videos that now appear as private or deleted, or any other unexpected changes
   • YouTube-<PLAYLIST_NAME>-diff-backup.csv: if a ...diff.csv file existed in the output directory before running the script, this file will contain a backup for it
   • YouTube-<PLAYLIST_NAME>-missing-videos.csv: if an ...items.csv file existed in the output directory before running the script, this file will contain information about videos that existed before and now don't exist in the playlist anymore. Note: sometimes deleted videos will still appear but just with a title change of "deleted video", and sometimes they will go missing completely and appear in this file
   • YouTube-<PLAYLIST_NAME>-missing-videos-backup.csv: if a ...missing-videos.csv file existed in the output directory before running the script, this file will contain a backup for it

[Advanced] Additional setup for exporting data from private playlists

If your playlist is private, extra setup is required for the script to be able to export data from it. In addition, running the CLI to retrieve data from private playlists will open a browser window and require you to manually authenticate. The necessary extra steps are:

1. Go to https://console.cloud.google.com/apis/dashboard (where)
2. Click on "OAuth consent screen" on the sidebar to the left, and then go to "Clients"
3. Create a new client for OAuth2 access with the type field set to "Desktop"
4. Navigate to the created client, and click "Download JSON"
5. When calling the CLI, you will need to specify the --private-playlist argument, and also provide the path of the downloaded file using the --secret-file argument
6. In the audience section, add your user as a test user
7. Continue setup from previous section

FAQ

How do I raise issues with the project?

You can either open issues on the GitHub project or email deansg@gmail.com

What do I do if I want to recover videos that are already private/deleted before I started using the tool?

In that case you need to retrieve the URLs of the problematic videos (are also exported in the CSV), and can then use the Wayback Machine to see if it was archived before becoming unavailable. If you do find it, try to look for another version of the video on YouTube!

Is there a way to use the tool without having Python installed?

Currently, the tool can be run / installed only on machines that have Python. If you have ideas for other ways to distribute it that may be beneficial to others please let me know!