How to save and organize YouTube videos
YouTube already gives you three places to keep videos. Start there; reach for something else only if they stop being enough.
Watch later, for "not now". Tap Save under a video: it goes to Watch later, or to the playlist you saved to last, and Change lets you pick which. On a phone, Watch later is in the You tab (tap your profile picture); on a computer, click You in the menu on the left. It's one list, in the order you saved, which suits a queue and not much else. (Videos made for kids can't be saved to it, or to a playlist.)
Playlists, for anything you want to keep together. Tap Save, then Change and New playlist, give it a name, and choose who can see it: Private (only you), Unlisted (anyone with the link) or Public. Make one for each subject, project or mood. A video can be in as many playlists as you like. Playlists are good for sharing and for playing videos in a row.
Liked videos, kept for you automatically. Every video you like joins the Liked videos playlist. It's the easiest record of what you enjoyed, but a like is all it holds: no score, no note, no reason.
What none of them do. YouTube doesn't let you rate a video beyond like or dislike, or keep a private note of what you thought of it, and a video that's removed or made private can't be played from your playlists any more. Finding something again means remembering its title or which playlist you put it in.
When an app helps. If you want to remember what you thought of each video, not just that you saw it, keep a library elsewhere. Krater, an iPhone app and a web app, is one: add a video with the Share button in the YouTube app or by pasting its link, mark it watched or put it on your watchlist, rate it out of five stars, write a review (for everyone, or just for you), and gather videos into lists. Videos still play on YouTube; Krater keeps your library, not the videos. It doesn't sign in to YouTube, so it can't read your playlists or history: you add each video yourself.
Krater isn't affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by YouTube or Google.
