YouTube Takeout Viewer
Open the YouTube portion of a Google Takeout export and turn it into a private, searchable recap: watch history, search history, top channels, ad views, and when you actually watch.
Google Takeout can export YouTube history as HTML (the default) or JSON — this viewer reads both, so there's no format setting to change.
Getting the export
- Go to takeout.google.com, click "Deselect all", then select only "YouTube and YouTube Music"
- Under that product, open "All YouTube data included" and keep just "history"
- Create and download the export — the default HTML format works fine, JSON works too
- Drop the ZIP here, or extract it and select the watch-history / search-history files together
History reader
watch-history / search-history (HTML or JSON)
YouTube export map
Waiting for a YouTube export. Watch history and search history power this viewer — top channels, search trends, and when-you-watch patterns.
Everything is parsed in your browser. Only YouTube files are read from a full Takeout ZIP — other Google services in the export are ignored.
What you get
What the YouTube viewer shows
Watch history
Every video in your Google Takeout history with its channel and the date you watched it, plus your top channels and most-rewatched videos.
Search history
Everything you searched for on YouTube, with your most frequent searches ranked.
Viewing patterns
Activity over time by day, week, month or year, a day-of-week chart, a time-of-day chart, your busiest day, your longest streak, and how much of it was YouTube Music.
Export coverage
A tab showing which parts of the export were found and read, so you can see what the file did and didn't contain.
FAQ
YouTube export questions
Which Google Takeout files does this read?
The YouTube and YouTube Music product: watch/search history, comments, live chats, playlists, subscriptions, music library songs, and basic channel metadata. You can upload the full Takeout ZIP, and every other Google service in it is ignored, or selected extracted files. Takeout translates file names into your account's language, so the viewer recognises history files by what's inside them too.
Does it work with both HTML and JSON exports?
Yes. Takeout exports YouTube history as HTML by default, and the viewer reads both HTML and JSON, so there's no format setting to change.
Does it include comments, playlists or subscriptions?
Not yet. This version covers watch history and search history only.
Why might the times look a little off?
The HTML export prints timestamps with a bare timezone abbreviation and no offset, so the viewer reads the clock times as printed. Patterns like time of day and streaks are still meaningful, but absolute UTC times may be shifted. The dashboard shows a warning about this.
Can it handle a large watch history?
It was tested against a real export with more than 18,000 watched videos and over 2,000 searches, and the parsing runs in a background worker so the page stays responsive.