Bulk delete videos from a YouTube playlist — or your Liked videos

YouTube has no "select all" and no checkboxes. To take fifty videos out of a playlist, the official method is to open a menu, click remove, wait for the page to jump, and do it again. Fifty times.

Before anything else: do you want the whole playlist gone?

Then don't use any of this. Just delete the playlist. YouTube will do that in one click, and most guides on this topic never mention it.

Open the playlist, click the three dots near the playlist's title (not on a video — on the playlist itself), and choose Delete playlist. Gone, all of it, instantly. If you wanted to keep the name, make a fresh empty one and reuse it. Thirty seconds, versus an hour of clicking.

Everything below is for the other situation — when you want to keep the playlist but throw out a big chunk of what's in it. The stuff you've already watched. The first two years of it. The forty tutorials you saved for a project that finished. That is the job YouTube genuinely gives you no tool for, and that's what this page fixes.

If you're here about your Liked videos, you're in the right place

Everything on this page works on Liked videos as well, and that's the list most people actually need it for. It's the one that quietly grows for years — every thumbs-up you have ever tapped, since whenever you made the account, all sitting in one list you never asked for. YouTube gives you no way to clear it and no way to delete it, because it isn't a playlist you made. It's built in.

Same steps, one difference: in step 1, go to youtube.com/playlist?list=LL instead of opening a playlist. LL is what YouTube calls that list internally. Sort it Date added (oldest) like everything else, and the oldest likes go first.

Removing a like is the same as un-liking. There is no separate "take it off the list but keep the like" — they're the same action, which is exactly why there's no undo. If a creator can see their like count drop, this is why. Not a reason to avoid it, just a thing to know before you clear ten years in one go.

Here's your takeaway. You copy a short piece of text from this page and paste it into a hidden panel that is already built into your browser. It then clicks "remove" for you, over and over, starting with the videos you added longest ago, about one a second. You watch it happen and you can stop it any time.

Do not install an extension to do this. An extension that can edit your YouTube account keeps that permission forever, quietly, and whoever owns it can sell it to someone else later — that's a well-worn route for a harmless little tool to turn into something else after you've forgotten it's installed. This has no permissions at all. It's gone when you close the tab.

Two things you need first

1. It has to be your own playlist. You can only remove videos from playlists you made yourself, on the account you're signed in to. There is no way to edit someone else's, and nothing here changes that.

2. A real computer. Desktop or laptop. Phones and tablets don't have the hidden panel this uses, so it can't work there at all.

If the same video is in several of your playlists, relax. Taking it out of this one does not touch any of the others, and it does not touch Watch Later. Playlists are just lists pointing at videos — removing a pointer from one list leaves every other list exactly as it was. This matters if you keep separate playlists per project and deliberately file the same video in more than one.

Which browser are you using?

The steps below change to match. Not sure? Leave it on the first one — that covers most people, and Edge, Brave and Opera are all Chrome underneath.

Do this, in this order

Seven steps. Most take about five seconds. Step 2 is the one that decides which videos get removed, so read that one twice.

Open the playlist Go to YouTube, open the menu on the left, and click the playlist you want to thin out. For Liked videos, go straight to youtube.com/playlist?list=LL. Either way you should be looking at the full list of videos in it.
Put the videos you want gone at the top There's a Sort button above the list. For clearing out old stuff, choose Date added (oldest). Careful here. Two of the choices look nearly the same. Date added is when you put the video into the playlist. Date published is when the video was uploaded to YouTube — which could be years before you ever saw it. You almost certainly want Date added (oldest). This matters because the tool starts at the top of the list and works down, so whatever is sitting on top is what disappears first. Sort it wrong and it removes the wrong videos.
Copy the script Click this button. It copies the text to your clipboard. Nothing else happens yet.

Want to read it first? The whole thing is printed further down the page.
Open your browser's hidden panel Press F12. A second window opens, usually on the right or along the bottom, full of tabs and code. Ignore all of it. Find the tab called Sources at the top and click it. Some laptops use F12 for volume or brightness. If nothing opens, hold Fn and press F12, or use Ctrl-Shift-I instead. Press F12. A second window opens full of tabs and code. Ignore all of it and click the tab called Console. Safari keeps this hidden until you switch it on. One time only: Safari menu → Settings → Advanced → tick Show features for web developers. Close settings, then press Option-Command-C.
Paste it in Down the left side of that new window is a narrow list of words. Click Snippets — if you can't see it, click the little >> arrows to reveal the hidden ones. Click New snippet. A big empty area appears. Click in it, press Ctrl-V to paste, then Ctrl-S to save. Then name it. In the list on the left it'll be called something like "Script snippet #1". Right-click that, pick Rename, and type yt-prune. Takes ten seconds and makes every future visit far quicker — see the next time is much faster. Why Snippets and not the Console, which is where most instructions on the internet send you? Because this script is long, and a long paste into the Console very often just doesn't run. No error. No message. Nothing at all. It's the single most common reason people give up. Snippets is a proper text editor, it always works, and it saves what you paste. Press Ctrl-B. The console turns into a bigger editing box. Click in it and press Ctrl-V to paste. Firefox has no Snippets panel; this bigger box is its version of the same idea. Use it — a long paste into the ordinary one-line console often fails silently. Click into the typing area at the bottom and press Command-V. Safari has no Snippets panel, so this is a plain paste. If it gives you trouble, this is genuinely easier in Chrome.
Run it Press Ctrl-Enter — hold Ctrl, tap Enter. Click Run at the bottom of the editing box. Press Enter. What you should see: a small white box appears in the top-right corner of the page, sitting over top of YouTube. It says Watch Later Prune — don't worry about the name, it works on any playlist — and it tells you how many videos it can see. If that box showed up, the hard part is done. Nothing appeared? Don't paste it a second time. Go to if nothing happened.
Try 10 first, not 500 Type 10 into the box and click Start. Watch what disappears off the top of your list, and check it's what you actually meant to lose. Only then put in a real number. This matters more on a curated playlist than it does on a dumping ground. If your sort was wrong, ten mistakes is annoying and five hundred is a disaster. It runs about one video a second on purpose — any faster and YouTube starts blocking it — so 500 videos is roughly ten minutes. You can hit Stop at any point, and everything already removed stays removed.

The next time is much faster

You never paste it again. Saving that snippet filed it away inside your browser, on your computer. It isn't part of the YouTube page, so you can close the tab, quit the browser, shut down overnight — it's still there. One paste, ever.

What doesn't survive is the little white box, because that belongs to the page and dies whenever the page reloads. So for each new batch, on any playlist:

Open the playlist and sort it again YouTube forgets your sort setting every time. Check it, every time.
Press Ctrl-Shift-P A small search box drops down from the top of the window.
Type !yt and press Enter The exclamation mark is what means "run my saved snippet". The white box comes straight back.

You don't need to open the developer panel first — that shortcut works directly from the YouTube page. On a Mac it's Cmd-Shift-P. The snippet is saved to that browser on that computer only; it doesn't follow your Google account around, so on a different machine you'll paste it once more. Worth bookmarking this page.

The script itself

Here it is, in full. You don't need to understand a word of it. But it's sitting here in the open where you can read it, or show it to someone who does — which is the whole reason to work this way instead of installing something you can't see inside.

If nothing happened

No white box, no error, just nothing Nearly always means you pasted into the Console rather than Snippets, and the paste was too long, so the browser quietly ignored it. To prove that's what happened, type this one short line into the console and press Enter: document.title='XX' If your browser tab's name changes to XX, then pasting works fine and length was the problem. Go back and use Snippets. It says "allow pasting" and refuses A safety feature — scammers talk people into pasting things into this exact box, so browsers block your first ever paste. Type allow pasting, press Enter, then paste normally. Once per browser, forever. It removed a few, then stopped on its own It's built to stop the moment it isn't certain what it's about to click, rather than keep going and hope. Reload the page and run it again — everything already removed is saved on YouTube's side and none of your progress is lost. It says "no remove entry matched" Your YouTube is in a language it doesn't recognise. It finds the remove button by reading the actual words on it. The list of languages it knows, and the one-line fix for any language that isn't on it, is here. Something else The longer troubleshooting list is on the Watch Later page — same script, same problems, and I didn't want to print it twice.

What it can't do to you

It doesn't delete videos. It takes them out of your playlist. The videos stay on YouTube and you can watch any of them again.
It only touches the playlist you have open. Your other playlists, and Watch Later, are untouched — even for a video that's in several of them.
It can't touch anyone else's playlist.
It never asks for a password or a sign-in or a key. It has no way to ask.
Nothing is sent to me or anyone else. It runs inside your browser and vanishes when you close the tab.
It can't undo itself. That's the one real warning. Once a video is out of the playlist, it's out. Which is exactly why step 7 says run ten first.

Clearing Watch Later instead?

Watch Later is a different problem, even though the same script does the work. It's the list that grows to thousands without you noticing, it can't be deleted the way an ordinary playlist can — only emptied — and YouTube shut off outside access to it back in 2016, so no tool or service can reach it either. The Watch Later version of this guide is here.