Add your YouTube playlists

There is no box on the Playlists tab that turns a YouTube playlist into a playlist here, which is the first thing most people go looking for. What there is instead are two separate routes, and they give you different things.

Connecting your YouTube account fills a From YouTube shelf on the Playlists tab with the playlists already on your channel. You browse and play them; they stay YouTube's.

Pasting a playlist link into a playlist of your own copies that playlist's videos into yours, where you can reorder them, add more, and play the lot with Play All. That is the one most people mean, and it is the one written out below.

Copy a YouTube playlist into one of yours

1. Open your dashboard and pick Playlists from the tab strip along the top: Library, Playlists, Receipts, Feeds.

2. Under My Playlists, click Create. The dialog is titled Create Playlist and asks for a Title, a Description (optional), and a Visibility, which is one of Private, Only you, Shared, Invite only, or Public, Anyone can view. Click Create.

3. Click the playlist you just made. It opens on its own screen, with a back arrow, its visibility badge, its video count, a Details button, and a Play All button.

4. Paste the YouTube playlist link into the box under Play All, the one reading Paste a YouTube URL....

5. Click Add. Every video in that YouTube playlist is appended to yours, in that playlist's order.

A single video link works in the same box and adds just that video, so this is also how you build a playlist by hand.

If the link points at a playlist we cannot read, the answer comes back as No videos found in that playlist, with the line "It may be private, empty, or unavailable." A YouTube playlist has to be public or unlisted for us to see inside it.

See the playlists already on your YouTube account

The From YouTube section sits below My Playlists on the same tab. Until you connect an account it reads Connect YouTube to see your playlists here. Once connected, your own playlists fill that shelf and open into their video lists.

Connecting is covered in Connect your YouTube account. It is a separate thing from the paste box: connecting shows you what is on YouTube, pasting brings the videos here.

On a phone

Nothing about these steps changes. The Library / Playlists / Receipts / Feeds strip stays across the top rather than folding away, My Playlists and From YouTube read the same, and the Create Playlist dialog asks for the same three things. Only the dialog's buttons move, stacking full width instead of sitting side by side.

What's next

• Create a playlist covers quotas, visibility and editing in full.
• Watch a playlist together picks up where this leaves off, with a playlist and a watch party running at once.

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