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: instead of opening a playlist, go to youtube.com/playlist?list=LL. LL is what YouTube calls that list internally. The script sorts it oldest-first like everything else, so 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. A small free script puts a panel on your playlist page. It sorts the list oldest-first by itself, then clicks "remove" for you, over and over, about one a second, starting with the videos you added longest ago. You watch it happen and you can stop it any time.

Two ways to run it. Install it once and it's there whenever you want it, even after a restart. Or paste it in each time and install nothing at all.

Skip the "playlist cleaner" extensions. An extension that can edit your YouTube account keeps that permission forever, quietly, and whoever owns it can sell it to someone else later. The install way here uses Tampermonkey, a general script runner that only runs scripts you put in it, and this script is printed in full further down the page so you can read every line.

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 can't run it 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 way do you want?

Which browser are you using?

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

Do this, in this order

Five steps, and the first three happen once per computer, ever.

Install Tampermonkey Go to tampermonkey.net. It sends you to your own browser's add-on store. Click Add. On Safari, use the paste way instead — click Paste each time above. It's the simpler route there.
Let it run scripts Chrome and its cousins now block every script runner until you say yes, and they don't tell you. Type chrome://extensions in the address bar (on Edge it's edge://extensions), find Tampermonkey, click Details, and turn on Allow User Scripts. No switch with that name? Your browser is a little older: turn on Developer mode at the top right of that same page instead. Nothing to do on Firefox. Skip to step 3. Not needed for the paste way.
Install the script Click this: Install the prune script. Tampermonkey opens a page showing the script with an Install button. Click it. It's called Watch Later Prune because that's the list it was first built for. It does your playlists and Liked videos too. Already installed it for Watch Later? Skip this step, you have it. When I fix something, Tampermonkey picks up the new version by itself.
Open the playlist and press the button Open the playlist you want to thin out. For Liked videos, go straight to youtube.com/playlist?list=LL. A small blue button appears in the top right corner: Prune this playlist. Click it. A white box opens called Playlist Prune, sorts the list to Date added (oldest) by itself, and shows a green line saying so. The button only waits for you so that browsing anyone else's playlist never gets touched. Red line instead of green? See the green line and the red line. No button at all? See 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. 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.

Six steps. Most take about five seconds.

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. You don't need to sort it. The script does that itself.
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: open the Safari menu, then Settings, then Advanced, and 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, called Playlist Prune. Give it a few seconds: it sorts your list to Date added (oldest) by itself and shows a green line saying so. If that box showed up, the hard part is done. Red line instead? See the green line and the red line. 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. 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 green line and the red line

The script always removes from the top of the list, so whatever sits on top is what disappears first. Before it lets you press Start, it sorts the list to Date added (oldest) and then checks that the sort really took.

Green line, "Sorted: Date added (oldest)": you're good. Press Start.

Red line: it couldn't find the sort control, or couldn't be sure it picked the right choice, so it clicked nothing and locked the Start button. That's deliberate. Sort it yourself: there's a Sort control above the list. Choose Date added (oldest), then tick the box in the panel that says you did. Start unlocks.

Careful with that choice. Two of them 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 want Date added (oldest). The script itself will never pick Date published — it refuses anything that doesn't say both "added" and "oldest".

Liked videos with no Sort control at all? Then you'll get the red line, and the top of the list is your most recent likes. Only tick the box if those are the ones you want gone.

The next time is much faster

Installed it? Nothing to do. Open the playlist, press Prune this playlist, and the panel sorts and waits for you. It remembers the last number you typed. Restarts, reboots, new tabs: it's there every time.

The button only shows on playlist pages, and it does nothing until you press it. The × in the panel's corner closes it back down to the button.

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.

Loading the script...

Or open it on its own: watch-later-prune.user.js. With Tampermonkey installed, that link offers to install it.

If nothing happened

I installed it, but no button appears on my playlist Almost always the second install step: the browser is quietly blocking Tampermonkey from running scripts. Go back to your extensions page, Tampermonkey, Details, and make sure Allow User Scripts is on (or Developer mode on older browsers). Then reload the playlist. The button only shows on playlist pages, the ones whose address has playlist?list= in it. It stopped and a "Copy page details" button appeared YouTube changed something the script relies on, and it stopped rather than guess. Press Copy page details, then paste what it copied into the feedback box at the bottom of this page. It's a description of the buttons on your page, nothing personal, and it's the fastest way for me to fix it. Tampermonkey users get the fix automatically. Pasted it: 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 in the menu" If it adds "is this your own playlist?", that's the likely answer: YouTube only offers remove on playlists you made. Otherwise 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, on your computer. The Copy page details button only copies to your own clipboard, and only if you press it. Pasted, it's gone when you close the tab. Installed, it stays until you remove it in Tampermonkey.
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 the steps say 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.