Available
Chrome, Edge & Firefox · YouTube
Playlist Wrangler
A free extension for Chrome, Edge, and Firefox that organizes any YouTube playlist — search it, auto-tag it, split it, export it. No API keys, no OAuth, no paid tier, and your index lives in your browser, not on a server.
Read the docs Free · v1.34.0 · all three stores
What it does
Scan a playlist once and every video in it is searchable, filterable, sorted into categories automatically, and ready to be moved, removed or played in bulk.
Find
- Search every video by title, across all your scanned playlists at once
- Filter by category, channel, length, age, views, likes, captions, language
- Tell Shorts from videos, and songs YouTube Music will play from the rest
- Sort by newest, oldest, longest, shortest, most liked, likes per view — or shuffle
- Save a named view — a search, sort and filters, reopened in one click
- One list across every playlist, with a video saved in several merged into one row
Sort automatically
- 252 categories and 40 languages, worked out on your device — topic, genre, film & TV, format, mood
- Nothing to label by hand, and not a paid upgrade
- Add or remove your own categories, on one video or a hundred
- A few thousand videos in a couple of minutes — keep browsing while the scan runs
- Scan every video in detail (optional) for YouTube’s own category, keywords and exact stats
Clean up
- Filter by watch progress — how much of each video you have watched
- Mark videos unwatched in bulk, clearing the red progress bar
- Find duplicates — videos saved in more than one playlist
- Select many, then add, move or remove across playlists — with one-tap undo
- Split one giant Watch Later into clean playlists
Play
- Play a filtered set from any row, or your selection in the order you picked it
- Play next or Add to queue, onto YouTube’s real queue
- Play your songs on YouTube Music
- Send what you picked to your phone with a QR code
- Ask what’s in a video without playing it, and keep the answers
Save and keep
- Save to any playlist straight from a thumbnail
- Import pasted YouTube links or video IDs into a playlist
- Export any view to CSV
- Keep the row of any video YouTube deletes, privates or blocks
- Warn before a playlist hits the 5,000-video cap, and free up room in one click
- Stay in sync with YouTube: changes show within a couple of minutes while the panel is open
Private
- No API keys, no OAuth, no quotas — it rides your own signed-in session
- The whole index stays in your browser
- Private and unlisted playlists, Watch Later and Liked videos
- Multiple signed-in YouTube accounts, kept apart
- The like-to-view ratio on every video, right in YouTube
Scroll for more → The videos load from YouTube only when you press play.
New in v1.34.0
- Search finds your filters as well as your videos. While you type, the categories, playlists, channels and other filters your words name appear as chips where the filter pills sit: click one to filter by it, or Shift-click to hide it.
- A filter that is on shows what it holds without a hover: how many values it includes, how many it hides, and the ✕ that clears it, one in each corner of its pill.
YouTube hands you a playlist, not a way to search it. Past a hundred videos it barely lets you scroll, and the official API means keys, OAuth, and quotas. Playlist Wrangler skips all of that, makes the list findable, and lets you reshape it into playlists you actually use.
A closer look
Search and filter that works
Full-text search across every video, plus filters for category, channel, length, language, age, views, likes, and captions. Each filter leads with the values still present in what you’re looking at.
Sorts every video for you, free
The moment a playlist is indexed, every video is sorted into 252 categories — 34 topics, 164 music genres, film and TV genres, formats, moods — and 40 languages. The genre tree is weighted by where YouTube’s audience actually is, not one country’s charts. No labeling, and not a paid upgrade.
Save to any playlist, without leaving the page
A + button on any thumbnail reaches your whole library through a search box, with recent destinations on top. A ✓ marks what you already have, and clicking it takes the video back out.
Split one list into many
Filter to what belongs together, select the lot, and move it into its own playlist in one step. Every bulk add, remove, or move has a one-tap undo.
Build tonight’s queue by hand
Cmd-click (Ctrl on Windows) the videos you want, in the order you want them, and press Play. Each one wears its place in the running order as you pick it, and they play in exactly that order as a temporary playlist. Or push them onto YouTube’s real queue, after whatever is already playing.
Finish what you started
Filter by how much of each video you have already watched — Watched, 50–90%, Under 50%, Not started — read from the red bar YouTube itself draws, never guessed from length. And when a bar is wrong, select those videos and Mark unwatched clears it, the only way YouTube allows: by removing them from your watch history.
Your library outlives YouTube’s limits
A video YouTube deletes or privates keeps its row, with the title you would otherwise never see again. A playlist near the 5,000-video cap reads as a fraction of it, with a one-click way to free up room. Liked videos past 5,000 are kept instead of dropped. And any view exports to CSV.
Honest about limits
Titles first, detail on request
Descriptions and transcripts aren’t part of basic playlist data, so a scan reads each video’s title and channel, and opens only the newest 100 for more. Scanning every video in detail adds YouTube’s own category, keywords, and exact stats to the rest.
Automatic categories are guesses
They’re worked out on your machine from what a video says about itself, so some will be off. Every one can be changed or removed, in bulk if you like, and anything you set by hand is never overwritten.
YouTube moves, and I follow
It reads YouTube’s live page rather than a stable API, so a big redesign can occasionally call for an update. The parser is built defensively to ride most of them out.
Questions
How do I search inside a YouTube playlist?
Scan the playlist once, and every video in it becomes searchable in the side panel — by title, across that one playlist or every playlist you’ve scanned. You can stack filters on top of the search: category, channel, length, views, likes, age, language, and whether a video has captions. YouTube gives you no search inside a playlist past what fits on screen, which is the gap this fills. How search and filters work →
Can it organize a huge Watch Later?
That’s the case it was built for. Watch Later is scanned like any other playlist, then you can search it, filter it down to what belongs together, and move that selection into its own playlist — so one 3,000-video pile becomes playlists you’d actually open. Bulk add, move, and remove each have a one-tap undo. Two filters do most of the triage: Progress, for what you have never started versus what you are already through, and Saved In, for what is only in Watch Later versus what already has a home elsewhere. And because Watch Later stops at 5,000 videos, the panel warns you as it fills, offers to free up room by moving the oldest 500 out in one step, and exports any view to CSV. Bulk actions in the docs →
How do I clear the red progress bar, or mark a YouTube video as unwatched?
Select the videos in the panel, open the ⋯ menu in the bulk bar, and choose Mark unwatched. YouTube has no setting for the red bar — it is drawn from your watch history, so the only way to clear it is to take those videos out of that history, which is exactly what this does, and it is the same thing YouTube’s own History page does one video at a time. One pass clears every view of a video, however many times you watched it. It only touches videos YouTube has recorded progress on, tells you how many that is before you agree, and reports anything it could not do afterwards. Because a history entry cannot be put back, there is no undo, and the confirm says so. Pair it with the Progress filter to select everything you have finished in one go. Mark unwatched in the docs →
Can I filter a playlist by what I have already watched?
Yes. “More filters” has a Progress filter with four stops — Watched, 50–90%, Under 50%, and Not started — so a long Watch Later splits into what you have never opened, what you sampled and bailed on, what you are nearly through, and what is done. It reads the progress marker YouTube itself puts on a row, the red bar you already see under a thumbnail, so it is YouTube’s own answer rather than a guess from the length of a video. The part-watched range splits at the half because “I bailed” and “I am nearly there” want opposite things, and 90% counts as watched, since end cards and credits are the stretch nobody sits through. Panel rows carry the same bar, hovering one gives the exact percentage, and exports gain a Watched % column. If your watch history is paused the filter simply does not appear, rather than claiming you have watched nothing. The Progress filter in the docs →
How do I find videos I have saved in more than one playlist?
With the Saved In filter under “More filters”: 1 playlist, or 2+ playlists. Narrow Browse to one playlist first — Watch Later, say — and it answers the question worth asking about a long list: what in here have I already saved somewhere else, and can therefore come out? It counts distinct playlists, so a video sitting twice in the same playlist is not an overlap, and it only counts playlists you have scanned, so an unscanned playlist can hide an overlap but never invent one. Select what it finds and Remove takes it out of the one list, with an undo. Saved In in the docs →
What happens when a YouTube playlist hits the 5,000-video limit?
YouTube stops the playlist at 5,000 and never tells you: the save button flashes “Saved” and the video is dropped. Playlist Wrangler shows the count as a fraction once a playlist passes 90% — “4,812 / 5,000” — and every Add and Move menu says how many still fit, or marks the playlist Full and won’t let you pick it. A “Free up room” link opens the playlist with its oldest 500 videos already selected, so moving them into another playlist is the next click. Liked videos behaves differently: liking keeps working past 5,000 but YouTube lists only the latest 5,000, so the panel keeps every like that falls off, marked Overflow. The 5,000 cap in the docs →
A video in my playlist was deleted — can I find out what it was?
If you scanned the playlist before it disappeared, yes. When a video is deleted, made private or blocked, YouTube’s playlist page hides it and just says “Unavailable videos are hidden.” The panel reads with YouTube’s own switch for showing them, so it keeps the row, dimmed and marked Unavailable, with the title, channel and thumbnail from your last scan. You can filter to those rows, export them to CSV, and remove them; they can’t be played. It can’t recover a video it never saw, so scanning early is what makes this work. Unavailable videos in the docs →
Can it filter Shorts out of a playlist?
Yes. A Short in a playlist looks exactly like a video — same row, same link, same thumbnail — and length is no guide, since Shorts run to three minutes. So the extension asks YouTube rather than guessing, and “More filters” opens with a Videos | Shorts choice. A playlist that has quietly filled with Shorts can be seen for what it is, or set aside, and playlists made entirely of Shorts scan properly too.
Can I filter a playlist by genre, mood, or language?
Yes, and you don’t have to label anything first. Scanning sorts every video into 252 categories — 34 topics, 164 music genres, film and TV genres, formats and moods — plus 40 languages, all worked out locally on your machine. The genre tree is weighted by where YouTube’s audience actually is, so Sertanejo, Amapiano, Dangdut, Khaliji and Tamil film music are as reachable as House or Indie. Each of those is a filter you can stack with channel, length, views, likes, age, and captions, and you can add categories of your own on top.
Is there a free extension that automatically tags or categorizes a YouTube playlist?
Yes. Playlist Wrangler categorizes every video the moment you scan a playlist — into 252 categories across topics, music genres, film and TV genres, formats and moods, plus 40 languages — with no manual tagging and no setup. The automatic categorizing is part of the free extension, not locked behind a paid tier or upgrade. You can search, filter, and split your playlists by those categories right away, and add your own on top.
How do I add a list of video links to a YouTube playlist?
With the Import button in the results bar. Paste your list of YouTube links — any mix of watch URLs, youtu.be, /shorts/, /embed/, /live/, or bare 11-character video IDs, separated by commas, spaces, or newlines — choose the playlist, and Playlist Wrangler adds them all in one pass, skipping ones already in the list and reporting anything it can’t resolve. YouTube itself has no paste-a-list import, and this needs no API key or OAuth. See the import docs →
Can I export a YouTube playlist to CSV or Excel?
Yes. “Export CSV” downloads exactly the list in front of you — filters and sort order included — with title, channel, video ID, URL, duration, views, published date, and categories in the columns. It’s UTF-8 with a BOM, so Excel opens it cleanly. It’s the practical answer to YouTube’s 5,000-video cap: a list you spent years building becomes a file you keep. Export details →
Can it summarize a YouTube video without playing it?
Quick Ask does. From a thumbnail or the watch page, ask about a video and the answer appears beside it — a short summary by default, with Key Points, Chapters (timestamps you can click to jump the player) and any modes you write yourself one click away across the top of the answer. Answers stay open until you close them, and the past week of them can be reread from the Manage tab. It runs on YouTube’s own built-in Ask AI, so there is nothing extra to sign into, and it only works on accounts YouTube has given that feature.
Can I sort or shuffle a playlist by length, views, or likes?
Yes — newest or oldest, longest or shortest, most liked, best likes-per-view, or a random shuffle, over whatever your filters have left. Pick “Play from here” on any row and the list plays through in that order with autoplay, as a temporary playlist, so there is nothing to build or clean up afterwards.
Can it find the songs in my playlists and play them on YouTube Music?
Yes. The panel asks YouTube Music itself which of your videos it will play, rather than guessing from a title or channel, and fills that in with each scan and sync. Each song carries a small music note on its row; click it to show only songs, remembered across opens, or pick On YT Music / Not on YT Music under More filters. A song’s playback menu offers “Play on YT Music” for that song and “Play from here on YT Music” for the songs on screen from that row, in the order shown, and with songs selected a YT Music button sits beside Play. A video nobody has asked about yet is in neither bucket, so nothing is filed as not music by default, and a line under the count says how many are still being checked. YouTube Music in the docs →
Can I add videos to YouTube’s queue from the panel?
Yes. The play button on any row’s thumbnail opens a small menu with Play from here, Play next, and Add to queue; the last two write into the real queue of the YouTube tab you have open, the same one YouTube’s own “Add to queue” fills, so you can stack videos onto whatever is already playing. Select several and a Queue button appears beside Play that adds them all, in the order you picked them, and reports exactly how many landed. Queueing in the docs →
What is the like-to-view percentage it shows?
How well a video landed, before you spend time on it. The like-to-view percentage sits inline in YouTube’s own byline right after the view count, on the watch page, the home feed, and search results — and every row in the panel carries likes, views, that ratio, length, and age, so you can sort or cut a huge list by what people actually liked.
Do I need a YouTube or Google API key?
No. There’s no API, no OAuth, and no quota. It reads the playlist from the page you’re viewing, using your own signed-in session.
Does it work on private or unlisted playlists?
Yes. As long as you’re signed in and can see the playlist, the extension can scan it.
Where is my data stored?
In your browser’s local storage, on your machine. Your playlists and categories never leave your device. The only thing it sends is anonymous, content-free usage counts, and there’s no account to create.
Can it change anything on my YouTube account?
Only what you ask it to, in three ways. It adds, moves, and removes videos in your playlists, each with an undo. Adding a video to Liked videos, or removing it, likes or un-likes it on YouTube. And Mark unwatched removes a video from your watch history, which is what clears the red progress bar; that one has no undo. It never subscribes, comments, or posts.
Is it free?
Yes. It’s completely free and ad-free, including the automatic tagging — there’s no paid tier that unlocks extra features. If it helps you, you can support the work, but you never have to.
How is it different from PocketTube?
They solve different problems. PocketTube organizes the channels you subscribe to — groups, a filtered feed, notifications. Playlist Wrangler organizes the videos inside your playlists — search, automatic tagging, splitting, export. Many users would sensibly run both. Read the full comparison →
My old playlist extension stopped working. Does this replace it?
Probably, yes. Several popular playlist and Watch Later extensions have gone a year or more without a release and no longer keep up with YouTube’s page changes. Selecting videos in bulk, moving and copying them between playlists, removing duplicates, sorting and bulk-clearing are all here, and there is nothing to set up first. Which ones still work →
Which browsers does it work on?
Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Firefox each have their own listing, and the Chrome build installs in Brave, Opera, and Arc as well. It’s a Manifest V3 extension, and every listing is built from the same source, so the features match. Opera and Arc have no side panel for extensions, so there the panel opens as a window of its own — see below.
Is there a Firefox version?
Yes, on Firefox Add-ons, built from the same source as the Chrome extension. It runs in Firefox’s sidebar instead of Chrome’s side panel, and every feature is the same, including automatic tagging, Quick Add, and export. If you browse YouTube inside a Multi-Account Container, it uses the session belonging to that tab, so the right account is the one it works with. Get it for Firefox →
Is there a Microsoft Edge version?
Yes, on the Edge Add-ons store, from the same source as the Chrome extension. It uses Edge’s own side panel, and every feature is the same. You could also install the Chrome listing in Edge, but the Edge listing updates through Edge itself, so it’s the one to use. Get it for Edge →
Does it work in Arc?
Yes, since 1.17.0, as a window rather than a side panel, and it is experimental. Arc and Opera are the two Chromium browsers without Chrome’s side panel API for extensions, so there the panel opens as a window of its own beside your browser window. The library, search and playlist edits work from that window; Play and Add to queue use the YouTube tab you have open. In Opera the keyboard shortcut toggles the window; Arc does not deliver extension shortcuts, so use the toolbar icon there. If something does not behave as it does in Chrome, the feedback link in the panel reaches me.
Looking for how-to steps on a specific feature? The searchable docs cover every one.
Found a bug or have an idea?
It goes straight to the maker — one person who builds Playlist Wrangler. No account, no thread to chase.
Organize any YouTube playlist.
Free, private, and it stays out of your way. Pick your browser.
Free and ad-free. If it helps you, you can support the work.