Can I download all my Youtube videos?
Q In the early days of Youtube I uploaded some family videos. They’re all quite silly and short, but I want to remove them for privacy reasons because I’m sure now that Youtube is huge they get viewed by all and sundry. However, because I don’t have the original clips I wonder if there’s a way to download them all? I did work out a way in Youtube to download each one individually, but there’s quite a lot of them. Nicholas Morris
A There is a way to do this, but it’s via the Google Takeout service rather than Youtube itself. This lets you download some or all of the data in your Google account, either in one fell swoop or selectively.
To begin, visit https://takeout.google. com and log in using your usual Google credentials. Next, assuming you don’t at this time want to download all your Google data, first click the ‘Deselect all’ button at the top right (see screenshot 1 ). Next, scroll to the bottom of the Products list to find the Youtube entry and then click to tick this. Note that here you can further refine what is and isn’t downloaded by clicking the ‘All Youtube data included’ button and modifying the tickboxes there. To download everything, however, just click the ‘Next step’ button.
Finally, use the options under the ‘Choose file type, frequency & destination’ heading to tailor the download. For example, you can have the exported videos added to your Google Drive, or other cloud-storage service, such as Onedrive or Dropbox – or emailed to you as a download link. Make your decision and then choose ‘Export once’ and keep the file type as ‘.zip’. We’d advise upping the maximum file size to 50GB. This will prove more efficient if you have a lot of videos, as the export will generate only one or a very few large ZIP files – whereas a 2GB limit could result in several or many smaller ZIP files. Now click ‘Create export’ 2 and wait for your ZIP file (or files) to be created. This could take a few minutes or hours.
That’s all there is to it. When the ZIP files arrive – either in your online-storage service or via email – you’ll simply need to right-click them in Windows, then choose Extract All.