Sunday, June 19, 2011

A word about working with YouTube playlists

I had some lengthy youtube playlists and found it impossible to sort them.

I've since figured out a few things by trial and error:

1. If the lists have 100 videos or less, they can be sorted by:

-order
-newest
-oldest
-most viewed
-longest
-shortest
-A to Z
-Z to A

So to keep your lists sortable keep them to 100 or less in size.

2. If you need to cull out duplicates from such a list you can just sort alphabetically and find the culprits.

3. If they're longer than 100, they're not sortable.

4. If you need to cull out duplicates from an unsortable list, or from multiple lists which have duplicates among them, there is a way to do it, based upon my discovery that while youtube playlists tolerate duplicates, the 'favorites' folder does not. So if you clean out the favorites folder, and move the offending playlists into the favorites folder, you'll have the duplicates automatically removed. At that point you can put the videos back in their respective playlists and remove them from 'favorites'.

For example:

-Ray has 580 blues videos in 6 playlists; he knows there are duplicates but doesn't even know how many, or which ones.
-He empties his favorites folder.
-For each list he (a) "adds" the videos to favorites, then (b) "removes" them from the list.
-When he's done with the 6 lists, he finds there are 530 videos in favorites, telling him there were, but are no longer, 50 duplicates.
-Now he "adds" the videos back to their lists, removing them from 'favorites' after he adds each column to its proper list.

[the way to do bulk operations is to click the arrow in upper left, wait for column to be selected, then perform bulk operation... for me it operated slowly, but it's better than nothing]

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3 comments:

  1. Can you make a more recent version of this. I know a lot has changed and I'm interested in what you find. You seem really knowledgeable. Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks, Matthew. I'm kind of sad about how YouTube has changed, but you are right that it has. When I can find some time I will do exactly what suggest.... look at YouTube as of the present moment, and update my blog post accordingly :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I can agree with you on that. It's done a lot of things that make it clunky and not smooth. There have been some, not many, good things they have done, but there is so much simple things that would improve it. The search for instance is broken if you try to filter anything. The subscription feed is a load of crap with its smart filtering only what youtube wants you to see. The list goes on.

      Delete

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Ray