Everything Playlist Wrangler does, grouped by task. Jump to a section on the left, or search your question and the guide narrows to the matching answers.
For extension v1.1.9 Updated July 21, 2026
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Click the Playlist Wrangler toolbar icon to open the side panel (a sidebar in Firefox). It opens on any page, not just YouTube. You can also right-click any page and choose “Open Playlist Wrangler.” Keyboard shortcut: Cmd+Shift+P on Mac, Ctrl+Shift+P on Windows/Linux (Chrome, Edge, Brave). In Firefox it’s Alt+Shift+P on Windows/Linux, or Ctrl+Shift+P on Mac. You can rebind it from the gear settings, or at chrome://extensions/shortcuts.
On an empty library it offers to scan your Watch Later — the Browse tab shows a “▶ Scan my Watch Later” button that reads the first 100 videos so you have something to search right away. Everything stays on your device. From there, open the Manage tab to add more playlists.
“Browse” is where you search, filter, sort, and play across everything you’ve indexed. “Manage” is where you add and index playlists, run tagging passes, and reach the Quick Add / Quick Ask feature settings. The gear (⚙) opens app settings from either tab.
Two ways. On any YouTube playlist page, click the floating “Scan this playlist” button — it opens the panel and starts indexing that list. Or open the Manage tab, find the playlist in the list, and click “+ Add.” Watch Later, Liked videos, and Liked Music are always available. Nothing on YouTube changes — indexing only reads the list into your local library.
On a playlist row in Manage, click “✦ Tag all” to add it and run a detailed tagging pass over every video (it shows an ETA and can be stopped at any time — you keep whatever finished).
Yes. The “Adding a playlist includes…” dropdown sets the policy for every add: no tags (fastest), recent tags (the newest 100 videos), or all tags (thorough, roughly an hour per 1,000 videos).
Open the row menu (▾) on an added playlist and choose “Remove from extension.” This deletes only the local copy from the extension. Your actual YouTube playlist is untouched.
Use “Load my playlists” / the refresh control in Manage. It fetches your playlist list via a YouTube tab. If you’re signed out, sign in on YouTube and try again.
The search box in Browse matches across every indexed video by title and channel. Results update as you type.
Use the Playlist, Category, and Channel filter pills at the top of Browse. You can also click a channel name, or a category/playlist chip on any row, to filter to it instantly. Stack filters to narrow thousands of videos down fast.
Yes. The eye icon on a filter pill flips it from “show only this” to “hide this,” pushing a category, channel, or source playlist out of view instead of narrowing to it. Handy for setting aside things you don’t want to see.
Click the “More filters” funnel button for metadata filters: duration, view count, age/upload date, and language. A badge shows how many extra filters are active.
The Sort control offers Recently added (the default), newest and oldest upload, longest and shortest, likes-per-view ratio, and more. Sorting applies to whatever the current filters have narrowed you to.
Click any video row to play it on the panel’s tab. Hold a modifier or middle-click to open it in a new tab instead.
Yes — “Play all” plays your current filtered/sorted set in order as a temporary YouTube playlist, with autoplay and next working normally. No playlist is created or left behind. YouTube caps a temporary queue at 50 videos, so larger sets are noted and truncated.
A round “+” button appears on video thumbnails across YouTube and on the watch page. One click saves the video to your default target playlist. Hover to pick from up to three configured target playlists, or “New playlist…” to create one seeded with the video. A ✓ means it’s already saved — click the ✓ to remove it. The same button appears on each row inside the side panel. Saving to “Liked videos” likes the video; removing un-likes it.
In the Manage tab, open the “Quick add button” card: turn it on or off, choose whether to mark videos already in your library with a ✓, pick which YouTube surfaces it appears on (Home, Search, Watch page, Watch sidebar, Subscriptions, Channel pages, Playlist pages, and the side panel), and choose up to three target playlists plus which one is the default.
The ✦ button on thumbnails and the watch page summarizes a video without playing it, showing the answer in a popover. It uses YouTube’s own built-in “Ask” AI, so there’s no extra sign-in. It only works on accounts that have YouTube’s Ask feature, it’s in beta, and answers can be inaccurate. Click runs your default mode; hover lists every mode. Answers can include clickable timestamps that seek the player.
Yes. Ask modes are editable saved questions (a name plus a prompt). Built-in presets include ELI5, Timestamps, Key quotes, Worth watching?, Counter-arguments, and Action items. You can set a default, edit them, and add your own — in the “Quick Ask” card on the Manage tab.
The moment a playlist is indexed, every video is sorted by a multilingual local classifier across 34 topics, over 100 music genres, film & TV genres, formats, moods, and 39 languages. Chips are color-coded by group. This is automatic and free — no manual tagging and no paid tier. See the full list below.
Six independent groups, so one video can carry several tags at once (a track can be Punjabi + Hip-Hop + Workout). Genres roll up their family tree: tagging Deep House also tags House, Electronic, and Music.
The detailed tagging pass (the “Tag all” and “recent tags” options) reads each video’s real YouTube category, the uploader’s keywords, the full description, and exact stats to produce sharper categories, plus music-genre and language enrichment. It’s throttled and resumable.
Yes. Each video row has a “+ category” input with live suggestions that reuse your existing labels. Remove a tag with the trash icon on its chip.
Click “Select” in the results bar to enter select mode — a checkbox appears in each row’s corner. Shift-click to select a contiguous range.
With videos selected, the bulk-action dock lets you add them to a playlist, move them across playlists, remove them from a playlist, create a new playlist from the selection, or select all. Every operation shows live progress and has a one-tap Undo. This is how you split one big list into several.
Each row shows the playlist(s) a video belongs to as chips: a single “Name ✕” chip you can remove, or “Name +N” with a hover dropdown listing every playlist, each removable. Read-only playlists (like Liked Music) show the chip without a remove control. Click a playlist name to filter to it.
Yes. The “Import” button in the results bar opens a box where you paste YouTube links or IDs — any mix of watch URLs, youtu.be, /shorts/, /embed/, /live/, or bare 11-character IDs, separated by commas, spaces, or newlines — and adds them to a playlist you choose. Anything it can’t resolve is reported as skipped.
The “Export CSV” button downloads exactly the current filtered/sorted list as a spreadsheet-ready CSV (UTF-8 with a BOM so Excel reads it cleanly). Columns: Title, Channel, Video ID, URL, Duration, Views, Published, and Categories (plus a Playlist column in the cross-playlist view). The file is named “Playlist Wrangler - <name> - YYYY-MM-DD.csv.” It’s an easy way to keep a copy of a list past YouTube’s limits.
While the panel is open, Auto-sync (the “Auto” toggle in the Manage activity strip, also a Settings toggle) keeps your indexed playlists current with a fast light sweep plus periodic full reconciles. “Sync now” forces an immediate full reconcile of every indexed playlist, which catches deletions and reorders. The activity strip shows status like “Checking… / Updating… / In sync · 3m ago.”
The extension reads YouTube using your own signed-in session, so if you’re logged out it shows a banner with an “Open YouTube” button. Open YouTube, sign in, and syncing/scanning resumes.
Yes. The panel automatically follows whichever Google/YouTube account the active YouTube tab is signed into — there’s no separate switcher. An account badge (avatar + name) shows in the tab strip only once two or more accounts have data. Your first account is fully free; managing a second (or more) is a one-time free unlock that asks for an email. Data is kept separately per account.
The gear opens app settings: your keyboard shortcut (with a link to rebind it), a Privacy toggle for anonymous usage analytics, an optional email opt-in for release notes, and a Danger Zone to delete all scanned data (or one account’s, when you have several). The Quick Add and Quick Ask feature settings live on the Manage tab instead.
Your index — playlists, tags, and metadata — lives in your browser’s local storage on your machine, and never leaves your device. There’s no account to create. The only thing sent to us is anonymous, content-free usage counts (and only if you leave analytics on); never your video titles, channels, tags, or playlist contents.
Gear → Danger zone → “Delete all data” wipes every scanned playlist and all stored video data (your Quick Add and privacy settings are kept). With two or more accounts, you can also delete a single account’s data. This can’t be undone.
Your library is empty. Click “▶ Scan my Watch Later” on the Browse tab, open the Manage tab to pick playlists, or open a playlist on YouTube and click “Scan this playlist.”
Quick Ask relies on YouTube’s own built-in “Ask” AI, which YouTube rolls out per account. If you never get a result, your account likely doesn’t have that feature yet. It’s also in beta, so answers can be wrong. Off the watch page it briefly opens a hidden background tab to summarize, which takes a few seconds.
Full tagging is roughly an hour per 1,000 videos because it visits each video for accurate detail. It’s throttled to be polite to YouTube, but it’s resumable and stoppable — stop any time from the activity strip and keep whatever finished, or choose the “recent tags” policy to tag just the newest 100.
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.
Yes. As long as you’re signed in and can see the playlist, the extension can index it.
Only your playlists, and only when you ask — you can add, remove, and move videos between playlists from inside the extension. It never likes, subscribes, comments, or changes anything else.
Yes — completely free and ad-free, including the automatic tagging. There’s no paid tier that unlocks features. If it helps you, you can support the work, but you never have to.
Any Chromium-based browser — Chrome, Edge, Brave, and Opera — plus Firefox. It’s a Manifest V3 extension. The one exception is Arc (see below).
Not currently. Playlist Wrangler lives in the browser’s side panel, and Arc is the one Chromium browser that doesn’t support Chrome’s side panel API. The extension installs, but the panel has nowhere to open — use Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, or Firefox instead.
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