As the world’s largest video sharing platform, YouTube has billions of videos, and finding the ones you love can be like finding a needle in a haystack. Consequently, the use of YouTube playlists has become a popular way for users to organize and save videos that they wish to view later or repeatedly. It is common for individuals to want to add multiple videos, sometimes in the tens or hundreds, drawn from the YouTube home page, their subscription page, or other playlists, to their own playlists for later viewing.
However, there is one common challenge that YouTube users often encounter: YouTube does not officially support a convenient way to select and add multiple videos to a playlist at once. Instead, the traditional method involves saving the videos one by one—a process that can be time-consuming and tedious. This article aims to offer two different solutions to this problem, enabling you to easily add multiple videos to a YouTube playlist without the hassle of saving them individually.
Also see: How to Share and Collaborate a Playlist on YouTube with Friends
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Adding multiple videos to a playlist on YouTube using “Add to queue”
The “Add to queue” feature, though primarily designed for creating a temporary video sequence for continuous play, can be cleverly leveraged to add multiple videos to a playlist. Here’s how:
- Open YouTube and navigate to the home or subscription page, or any location where the videos you want to add are.
- Click the option icon (denoted by three vertical dots) next to a video you wish to add to the playlist. From the dropdown menu, select “Add to queue“.
- A mini player will open at the bottom right of the screen, ready to play the videos you add to the queue.
- Click on the second video you want to add to your playlist. Instead of opening a new page for this video, YouTube will automatically add it to the queue.
- Repeat this process for as many videos as you wish to add. Remember, each time you add a video, it will start playing right away in the queue mini player. You can press the Spacebar key to pause the video whenever you add a new one.
- Once you’ve added all the videos you want to your queue, click the expand button in the queue mini player to open the queue playlist.
- In the expanded queue playlist, click the “Save” button.
- You can now save all these videos to an existing playlist, or create a new playlist if you prefer.
This method, while not originally intended for this purpose, offers the fastest way to add multiple videos to a playlist on YouTube without the use of any extensions.
Useful tip: How to Set YouTube to Always Play Highest Video Quality
Selecting multiple videos and adding them to a playlist using an extension
For users who don’t mind using extensions and prefer a more streamlined approach, the “Multiselect for YouTube” Chrome extension offers a perfect solution. It allows you to select multiple videos on YouTube without playing them, providing a hassle-free method to curate your playlist. The extension can be installed from the Chrome Web Store.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/multiselect-for-youtube/gpgbiinpmelaihndlegbgfkmnpofgfei
Once installed, follow these steps:
- Navigate to YouTube and go to the page with the videos you want to add to your playlist.
- Click on the blue tick icon at the top right corner of the YouTube page to activate the Multiselect extension.
- With the extension enabled, you can left-click on any video to select it, without the video starting to play.
- Repeat this process to select as many videos as you wish to add to your playlist.
- Once you’re satisfied with your selection, navigate to the extension menu and click on the “Add to playlist” button. This will allow you to add all the selected videos to any playlist of your choosing in one go.
With the “Multiselect for YouTube” extension, the task of adding multiple videos to a playlist becomes a breeze.
Linked issue: Computer Fan is Loud When Watching YouTube Videos
Summing up
Organizing multiple YouTube videos into playlists shouldn’t be a hassle. With these two methods, it certainly doesn’t have to be. Whether you prefer the convenience of a browser extension or the native features that YouTube offers, these steps will allow you to quickly and easily add multiple videos to a playlist in one go.
