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Bulk video updates

The whole reason ytstudio exists. Use this when you need to change titles, descriptions, or tags across many videos and YouTube Studio makes you click each one. Also covers uploading whole batches of videos from a directory of YAML sidecars.

List and inspect

ytstudio videos list                       # most recent uploads
ytstudio videos list -n 100 -o json        # 100 items, JSON
ytstudio videos list --scheduled           # only videos scheduled for future publish
ytstudio videos show <video-id>            # full metadata for one video

--scheduled filters to private videos with a future publishAt, which is the YouTube convention for "scheduled for release". Useful for sanity-checking a queue you just uploaded.

Update one video

ytstudio videos update <video-id> --title "New title"
ytstudio videos update <video-id> --description "New description"
ytstudio videos update <video-id> --tags one,two,three

update targets a single video; pass any combination of --title, --description, or --tags.

Search-and-replace across the channel

videos search-replace walks every video on the active channel, applies the substitution, and shows what would change. It is dry-run by default; pass --execute to actually update videos.

ytstudio videos search-replace --search "2024" --replace "2025" --field title
ytstudio videos search-replace \
    --search "old@email.com" --replace "new@email.com" --field description \
    --execute
ytstudio videos search-replace --search 'season \d' --replace 'season X' \
    --field title --regex

Flags:

  • --search, --replace (required): the substitution.
  • --field (required): title or description.
  • --regex: treat --search as a Python regex.
  • --limit: cap how many matches to act on (default 10).
  • --execute: actually apply the changes.

Quota cost

videos.update costs about 50 quota units per video. A bulk run that touches 200 videos eats the default daily quota (10 000 units). See API quota before kicking off large jobs.

Upload a batch from sidecars

videos upload takes a video file or a directory, pairs each .mp4/.mov with a sibling YAML sidecar describing its metadata, validates the lot, and then uploads them in order. It is dry-run by default; pass --execute to actually push to YouTube.

ytstudio videos upload ./outbox                       # dry-run preview
ytstudio videos upload ./outbox --execute             # actually upload
ytstudio videos upload ./outbox --execute --max 3     # cap the run (quota budget)
ytstudio videos upload ./outbox/single.mp4 --execute  # one specific video

Directory layout

outbox/
  holiday.mp4
  holiday.yaml      # required
  holiday.jpg       # optional thumbnail (.jpg or .png), max 2 MB
  travel-vlog.mp4
  travel-vlog.yaml

The sidecar must share the video's basename. A thumbnail with the same basename is picked up automatically; near-misses (different extension, wrong case) fail fast with a clear error rather than silently uploading without a thumbnail.

Sidecar (holiday.yaml)

title: Holiday recap 2026
description: |
  Multi-line description.
privacy: private              # private | unlisted | public
publish_at: 2026-06-01T10:00:00+02:00   # optional; forces privacy=private
tags: [travel, vlog]
category_id: "22"             # YouTube category id; default 22 (People & Blogs)
default_language: nl
default_audio_language: nl
made_for_kids: false

publish_at must be timezone-aware and in the future. If you set it, the upload pipeline forces privacy=private because that is the only privacy state YouTube accepts for scheduled releases.

Resumability

After each successful upload the sidecar is patched with the resulting video_id and an uploaded_at timestamp. Re-running videos upload on the same directory only retries sidecars without a video_id, so partial runs (quota exhaustion, network drop) are safe to resume.

If the write-back itself fails, the command prints the video_id to stdout before exiting so you can paste it into the sidecar manually and avoid a duplicate upload on the next run.

Quota and rate limits

videos.insert costs roughly 1600 quota units, so on the default 10k/day budget you can upload ~6 videos per day. Use --max to cap a run explicitly. If the API returns quotaExceeded mid-run, the pipeline stops cleanly, prints how many videos succeeded, and exits non-zero. See API quota.