Make Sense of Your YouTube Watched History
User-focused - It’s your data, and you should be empowered to analyze it! 📊
Converts YouTube’s Watch History into a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet: Easily organize and explore your viewing habits.
Cross-Platform Compatibility: Written in Python, the program runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. The generated spreadsheet can be opened in Excel, LibreOffice, ONLYOFFICE and Gnumeric.
See Your Data: Your data will show up on multiple tabs:
See your monthly views as a table and a chart:
See the videos and how many times you watched them. The links are clickable:
NOTE: In the test sample above, it looks like "Music Artist" is duplicated, but that is because the video links are different! One link points to music.youtube.com and the other points to www.youtube.com. So you you get separate counts for how many times you viewed a video versus listened to it.
This tool is designed for use with Python 3.12. Please ensure that this is the version of python you are using to build.
Use a virtual environment. If you don't know how to set this up, read this.
Use pip to install the required packages: pip install -r src/requirements.txt
Run the app: python3 src/watch_history_app.py
Download the code. Alternatively, you can download the release for Windows or Linux on the right of the screen and unzip it to where you want.
Visit Google Takeout and export everything from YouTube. I recommend that you switch the YouTube export to use JSON, as that will guarantee that the dates and times are accurate. But even if you don't switch to JSON, the program will do its best to use the local time.
Run the program with your exported data to transform your watch history into an insightful spreadsheet. You can leave the export zipped up if you want to, or you can point the program to the "watch-history.html" or "watch-history.json" file.
Open the resulting spreadsheet file in the spreadsheet program of your choice.
You can do it! Take control of your data and explore your YouTube journey.
I was intending to use YouTube's API for the data, but Google removed the API access to YouTube Watch History in 2016. Therefore, the program processes the Watch History file you can get from Google Takeout instead.