youtube-playlist-exporter 0.2.0

A CLI for exporting YouTube playlists' data to local files

YouTube Playlist Exporter

Tired of videos disappearing from your YouTube playlists, without leaving you the option to know what was there before?

Fear not! For this CLI will have you covered

This CLI allows exporting data about videos in your playlist to local files, that can be used as a backup in case videos from the playlist become private/get deleted.

If the CLI runs in a directory which contains output files from a previous run (with the same parameters), it will automatically detect differences in the specified playlist, and export them to files as well.

Installation

This CLI requires Python 3.10+ to run. It is published to PyPI and can be installed with pip using:

pip install youtube-playlist-exporter

Usage

1. Get a YouTube API Key. To do so, you can follow the instructions in this guide
2. Retrieve the YouTube ID of the playlist you want to create a backup for. This can be done in several ways. One of them is by navigating to the playlist's main YouTube page, and copying the text after "...list=" in the URL
3. If you didn't do so already, install the CLI (see installation)
4. Run the CLI using either the ype or youtube-playlist-export commands (full details on the CLI syntax are provided by running with the --help flag)
5. Several .csv files (tables which can be opened with Excel/imported to Google Sheets etc.) will be generated by the script in the output directory (<PLAYLIST_NAME> will be replaced with the name provided as an argument to the CLI):
   • YouTube-<PLAYLIST_NAME>-items.csv: contains the current details of all the videos in the playlist
   • YouTube-<PLAYLIST_NAME>-items-backup.csv: if an ...items.csv file existed in the output directory before running the script, this file will be a backup for it (in case something went wrong with running the script etc.)
   • YouTube-<PLAYLIST_NAME>-diff.csv: if an ...items.csv file existed in the output directory before running the script, this file will contain information about videos whose title changed. This can help detect videos that now appear as private or deleted, or any other unexpected changes
   • YouTube-<PLAYLIST_NAME>-diff-backup.csv: if a ...diff.csv file existed in the output directory before running the script, this file will contain a backup for it
   • YouTube-<PLAYLIST_NAME>-missing-videos.csv: if an ...items.csv file existed in the output directory before running the script, this file will contain information about videos that existed before and now don't exist in the playlist anymore. Note: sometimes deleted videos will still appear but just with a title change of "deleted video", and sometimes they will go missing completely and appear in this file
   • YouTube-<PLAYLIST_NAME>-missing-videos-backup.csv: if a ...missing-videos.csv file existed in the output directory before running the script, this file will contain a backup for it

TODOs

1. Add additional backup mechanisms? GIT backup?