YouTube has no export button for Watch Later, Liked videos or your own playlists. A browser extension can save them for you: TidyWL exports whichever list you have open as a CSV file, which Excel and Google Sheets open directly, or as JSON with more detail. The file has each video’s title, channel and link, and it is built on your own computer in seconds.
Why export a playlist?
- A backup. Watch Later and Liked videos exist only inside YouTube. If a list breaks, videos go missing, or you clear it and change your mind, an export is the only copy of what was there.
- A spreadsheet. Sort, annotate and share a list of videos in Excel, Google Sheets or Notion.
- A list of links. Feed the links to another tool, such as a note-taking app or an AI assistant.
How to export with TidyWL
- Install TidyWL for Chrome, Microsoft Edge or Firefox. It is free and needs no account.
- Open YouTube and open the TidyWL dashboard. Switch to Watch Later, Liked videos, or a playlist from the Playlists menu, and press Sync so the list is complete.
- In the toolbar, open Export & open and choose Export your videos as CSV or Export your videos as JSON.
The file downloads straight away. To open it in Google Sheets, use File, Import and upload the CSV.
What is in each file
CSV has one row per video, in the order you have the list sorted, with these columns: Index (the video’s position in the playlist), Title, Channel, Channel ID, Video ID, Set Video ID and URL. It is written with a byte-order mark so Excel reads it as UTF-8, and titles in any language open correctly.
JSON has everything TidyWL knows about each video: the fields above plus its length, view count, upload date as YouTube shows it, whether you watched it and how far, and the uploader’s tags. Use it when you want the full record or plan to process the list with a script.
Export only part of a list
The export saves the list you are looking at, not the whole playlist, so you can filter first:
- search by title, channel or tag
- pick a channel or a topic from the sidebar
- keep only long videos, only Shorts, or your own length range
- keep only unwatched videos, or only the ones you have finished
Then export, and the file holds just those videos. The same works on a merged view of several playlists.
Other ways to get your list out
Google Takeout exports YouTube data as files of video IDs and timestamps, without titles or channel names, and the export can take hours to arrive. Copying titles by hand from the playlist page works for a few dozen videos and stops being practical after that.
The export is built in your browser and saved to your own computer. Nothing is sent to TidyWL.