Scott, overwhelmed, hands on his head

Clear your YouTube Watch Later list

YouTube will not let you empty it. There is no "select all," no bulk delete, and no setting. If you have thousands in there, the official answer is to remove them one at a time, forever.

Here's your takeaway. A small free script puts a panel on your Watch Later page. It sorts the list oldest-first by itself, then clicks the "remove" button for you, over and over, about one a second, for as many videos as you tell it. You watch it happen. You can stop it whenever you want.

Two ways to run it. Install it once and the panel is simply there every time you open Watch Later, even after a restart. Or paste it in each time and install nothing at all.

Skip the "Watch Later cleaner" extensions. An extension that can edit your YouTube account keeps that permission forever, quietly, and the person who 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.

* Works in 16 languages — see the list at the bottom if YouTube is not in English for you.

Not Watch Later? If you're trying to clear out one of your own playlists, or the years of Liked videos YouTube has been quietly stacking up, that guide is over here — different list, and one shortcut that saves you the whole job.

Two things you need first

1. A real computer. A desktop or a laptop. This cannot work on a phone or a tablet, because phones do not have the hidden panel we are going to use. If your Watch Later list got huge because you kept tapping "save" on your phone, you will still have to sit down at a computer to clean it up. Sorry.

2. You have to be signed in to YouTube on that computer, with the same account the list belongs to.

That's it. You do not need to make an account, pay anything, or know how to code.

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.

Do this, in this order

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

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. Install the script Click this: Install Watch Later Prune. Tampermonkey opens a page showing the script with an Install button. Click it. That's the same script printed further down this page, and when I fix something, Tampermonkey picks up the new version by itself.
  4. Open your list Go to youtube.com/playlist?list=WL. A small white box appears in the top right corner, called Watch Later Prune. Give it a few seconds: it sorts your list to Date added (oldest) by itself, and then shows a green line saying so. Red line instead? See the green line and the red line. No box at all? See "If nothing happened".
  5. Try 50 first, not 3,000 Type 50 in the box and click Start. Videos vanish off the top of your list, one after another, and the box counts them. Once you've seen it work, run it again with a big number and go do something else. It goes at about one video per second, on purpose. Faster and YouTube starts blocking it. So 1,000 videos is about 20 minutes, and 3,000 is about an hour. Leave the tab open and let it grind. You can click Stop any time, and everything it already removed stays removed.

Six steps. Most of them take about five seconds.

  1. Open your list In your browser, go to youtube.com/playlist?list=WL. That is your Watch Later list. You should see your videos, and a whole lot of them. You don't need to sort it. The script does that itself.
  2. Copy the script Click this button. It puts the text on your clipboard. Nothing else happens yet.
    If you want to read it first, the whole thing is printed further down this page.
  3. Open your browser's hidden panel Press the F12 key. A second window opens, usually on the right or the bottom, full of tabs and code. Don't worry about any of it. Just find the tab named Sources along the top and click it. On some laptops F12 does something else, like change the volume. If nothing opens, hold Fn and press F12, or use Ctrl-Shift-I instead. Press the F12 key. A second window opens full of tabs and code. Don't worry about any of it. Click the tab named Console. Safari hides this panel until you turn it on. Do this once: click Safari in the menu bar, then Settings, then Advanced, then tick the box that says Show features for web developers. Close settings. Now press Option-Command-C.
  4. Paste it in On the left side of that new window you'll see a narrow list of words. Click Snippets. If you can't see it, click the little >> arrows to show the hidden ones. Then click New snippet. A big empty space appears. Click in it and press Ctrl-V to paste. Then press Ctrl-S to save it. Now give it a name. In that list on the left it will be called something like "Script snippet #1". Right-click that, choose Rename, and type wl-prune. Thirty seconds of effort that makes every future visit a lot quicker — see The next time is much faster. Why Snippets and not the Console, where most instructions on the internet tell you to paste? Because this script is long, and a long paste into the Console very often just... doesn't run. No error, no message, nothing. It's the single most common reason people give up on this. Snippets is a proper little text editor and it always works. It also saves the script, so you never have to paste it again. Press Ctrl-B. The console changes into a bigger editing box. Click in that box and press Ctrl-V to paste. Firefox doesn't have Snippets, and this bigger editing box is its version of the same thing. Use it — a long paste into the ordinary one-line console often silently fails to run. Click in the box at the bottom where you can type, and press Command-V to paste. Safari has no Snippets panel, so this is just a plain paste. If it doesn't work, try Chrome instead — this is easier there.
  5. Run it Press Ctrl-Enter (hold Ctrl, press Enter). Click the Run button 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 YouTube page, over top of everything. It says Watch Later 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 appeared, you've done it. The hard part is over. Red line instead? See the green line and the red line. Nothing appeared? Don't paste it again — scroll down to "If nothing happened".
  6. Try 50 first, not 3,000 In that little box, type 50 and click Start. Now just watch. Videos will start vanishing off the top of your list, one after another, and the box counts them as it goes. Once you've seen it work and you believe it, run it again with a big number and go do something else. It goes at about one video per second, on purpose. Faster and YouTube starts blocking it. So 1,000 videos is about 20 minutes, and 3,000 is about an hour. Leave the tab open and let it grind. You can click Stop any time, and everything it already removed stays removed.

The green line and the red line

The script always removes from the top of the list. On YouTube's normal sort, the top is your newest videos, which is exactly what you don't want gone. So 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: near the top of the list there's a Sort control. Choose Date added (oldest), then tick the box in the panel that says you did. Start unlocks.

Careful with that choice. There are two that look almost the same. Date added means when you put the video in your list. Date published means when the video was uploaded to YouTube. You want Date added (oldest). Pick the other one and it deletes the wrong videos. The script itself will never pick Date published — it refuses anything that doesn't say both "added" and "oldest".

The next time is much faster

Scott cheering, fists up

You probably won't clear the whole list in one go. Here's what happens when you come back tomorrow.

Installed it? Nothing to do. Open your Watch Later list and the panel is there, already sorting. It remembers the last number you typed. Restarts, reboots, new tabs: it doesn't matter, it's there every time.

The panel opens by itself only on Watch Later. On your other playlists you'll see a small Prune this playlist button instead, which does nothing unless you press it (the playlist guide covers that). The × in the panel's corner hides it until you reload.

The good news: you never paste it again. When you saved that snippet, your browser filed it away on your computer. It is not part of the YouTube page. So you can close the tab, quit the browser, shut the computer down overnight, and the snippet is still sitting there waiting. You paste it once, ever.

What doesn't stick around is the little white box. That belongs to the page, so it disappears every time the page reloads. So each time you want to do another batch:

  1. Open your list No need to sort it — the script does that again every time.
  2. Press Ctrl-Shift-P A little search box drops down from the top.
  3. Type an exclamation mark, then part of the snippet's name So if you called it wl-prune, type !wl and press Enter. The ! is what tells it "run my saved snippet". The white box comes straight back.

You don't even have to open the developer panel first — that shortcut works right from the YouTube page. On a Mac it's Cmd-Shift-P.

One catch worth knowing. The snippet is saved into the copy of the browser on that computer, under that profile. It does not travel with your Google account. If you sit down at a different computer, or switch to another browser profile, you'll paste it in once more. So it's worth bookmarking this page.

Firefox usually keeps whatever was in that bigger editing box, so when you press Ctrl-B again it's often still there and you just click Run. But it doesn't always survive a restart, so bookmark this page — pasting it again takes ten seconds.

Safari doesn't save it, so you'll paste it in again each time. Bookmark this page so the copy button is always one click away.

The script itself

Here it is in full. You do not have to understand it. But it's right here, in the open, where you can read it or show it to someone who does — which is the entire reason to do it 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

Every single one of these went wrong for us while we were building it, in roughly this order. So if you hit one, it isn't you.

I installed it, but no white box appears on my Watch Later page Almost always step 2: 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 Watch Later page. Also check the address is exactly youtube.com/playlist?list=WL — the panel only appears there. 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 at all. This is the big one, and it fooled us for an hour. It nearly always means you pasted into the Console instead of Snippets, and the paste was too long, so the browser quietly did nothing. No warning. It just ignored you.
Want to prove that's what happened? Type this one short line into the console and press Enter: document.title='XX'  If the name on your browser tab changes to XX, then pasting does work and the length was the problem. Go back and use Snippets. It says "allow pasting" and won't let you paste That's a safety feature. Scammers talk people into pasting things into this exact box, so browsers now block your very first paste. Type the words allow pasting, press Enter, then paste normally. You only do this once, ever. The panel is full of red errors and messages that have nothing to do with this Those are from your other extensions, shouting into the same window. They're harmless and they aren't about this script. There's a Filter box at the top of the console — type a word from the noise with a minus in front of it, like -adblock, to hide it. It says "no remove entry in the menu" Your YouTube is in a language the script doesn't recognise. It looks for the actual words on the remove button, and it knows the ones in the table at the bottom of this page. Two ways out: use the one-line fix under that table, or switch YouTube to English in Settings, run this, and switch back. It removed a few and then stopped by itself YouTube changed its page layout. The script is built to stop the moment it isn't certain what it's clicking, rather than keep clicking and hope. That's deliberate — a tool that quietly does the wrong thing three thousand times is much worse than one that stops. Reload the page and run it again. If it stops again, press Copy page details and send it to me through the feedback box below. It stopped partway and I lost my progress You didn't. Every video it removed is already gone from YouTube's side, saved, permanent. Just reload and start another batch.

What it can't do to you

Languages

YouTube's remove button doesn't have a fixed name inside the page's code, so the only way to find it is by the words printed on it. That means the script can only work in languages it has been taught. Here they are:

LanguageWording it looks for
Arabicإزالة
Chinese移除
Dutchverwijderen uit
Englishremove from
Frenchsupprimer de
Germanentfernen
Hindiहटाएं
Indonesianhapus dari
Italianrimuovi da
Japanese削除
Korean삭제
Polishusuń z
Portugueseremover de
Russianудалить из
Spanishquitar de
Turkishkaldır

The automatic sort only understands English. In any other language you'll get the red line: sort the list to your language's version of "Date added (oldest)" by hand, tick the box, and carry on. Removal works in every language in the table.

Your language isn't here? Easy fix. Click the three dots next to any video in your list and read the exact wording of the remove option — copy it letter for letter. Then, before you press Start, open the console (F12, then Console), paste this one line with your wording inside the quote marks, and press Enter:

window.__wlPruneText = 'remove from'

Clearing a playlist or your Liked videos instead?

The same script does those too, but the situation around them is different enough to be worth its own page — an ordinary playlist can simply be deleted outright, which Watch Later cannot, and Liked videos has its own quirk worth knowing before you clear ten years of it. That guide is here.

Built by Scott Covert — tools that fix things the platform will not · scovert.com · CC BY 4.0
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