Clean out your YouTube “Watch later” list — how to!

To take it away, it is everything but straight-forward and more or less a hack-around. In this quick post I will show you how to get it done using dev tools in Chrome (and probably it works in Edge as well).

Why is it so cumbersome? Well, the main issue is the fact there is no (public) API to manage your watch later list. Even though YouTube of course does come with a public API. I still have hopes up for Google to listen and fill that gap. A quick search using their own search engine reveals plenty of people struggle with the lack of management options with that default list. Not to mention automated clean-up per default, baked in into YouTube. (Now that would be something.)

In the meantime, I’d be happy about an API.

This here worked for the German version by September 2021:

setInterval(function() { document.querySelector(‘#primary button[aria-label=”Aktionsmenü”]’).click(); var things = document.evaluate(‘//span[contains(text(),”Später ansehen”)]’,document,null,XPathResult.ORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE,null); for (var i = 0; i < things.snapshotLength; i++) { things.snapshotItem(i).click(); } }, 100);

Source:

https://gist.github.com/astamicu/eb351ce10451f1a51b71a1287d36880f

Go to https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=WL, open Chrome Dev Tools and enter the script above into the console.

There is no official way to do it! And this script may break ANYTIME.

Enjoy!