Open YouTube history files in your browser
The watch-history.json or .html Google Takeout gives of your YouTube account. Open it right here as a card of what you watched, year by year. Nothing leaves your device.
Or drop it anywhere on this page
What you'll see
Your history opens as a card of what you watched and searched: each year’s top channels and videos, the ones you watched again and when you watched most, worked out on your device.
- Each year • Its top channels, videos and busiest day
- Searches • What you looked for most
- Subscriptions and comments • Read from the files beside it
- Every video • In a tree, Show as a table
About YouTube history
Google keeps what you watch and search on YouTube in My Activity, and Takeout hands it over in YouTube and YouTube Music/history as watch-history and search-history, in JSON or in HTML, beside subscriptions.csv and comments.csv. Chrome’s browsing history comes the same way as History.json.
Each entry is a title such as Watched How to read contour lines, the video’s address, its channel and the time to the millisecond, and an ad you watched says From Google Ads. The HTML version writes the same entries as a page of cards, its times in your time zone, and runs to hundreds of MB for a long history.
Filepeek reads the history itself into a card: how many times you watched, how many videos and channels, the ads, your busiest day, the videos you watched again, and for each year its top channels and videos. Drop it with search-history, subscriptions.csv and comments.csv and the card adds your top searches, subscriptions and comments, and every entry is in the tree, Show as a table.
YouTube watch history from Google Takeout
.json • .html
Format
- MIME type
- application/json
- Made by
- Released
- 2017
Inside the file
- Kept as
- JSON or HTML, an entry a watch
- Entry
- Title, address, channel and time
- Beside it
- search-history, subscriptions.csv, comments.csv
- Made by
- Google Takeout
Opens in every browser
Filepeek opens YouTube and Chrome history from Takeout in Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari, however long it is. On their own, browsers show the JSON as code and the HTML as one long page.
- YouChromeOpens through Filepeek
- YouEdgeOpens through Filepeek
- YouFirefoxOpens through Filepeek
- YouSafariOpens through Filepeek
Apps that open YouTube history
- WindowsShows it as text in Notepad
- MacShows it as text in TextEdit
- iPhone and iPadNo app opens it
- AndroidNo app opens it
Questions
How do I get my YouTube watch history?
At takeout.google.com, deselect all, tick YouTube and YouTube Music, and under All YouTube data included keep history. Pick JSON under Multiple formats for the exact times.
Why does my history start only a few years back?
Google only keeps what My Activity still has: anything older than your auto-delete setting, or a time history was paused, isn’t in it.
Why are some entries only an address?
A video that was deleted or made private keeps only its address in your history, with no title or channel.
Can I see my Chrome history the same way?
Yes. Chrome/History.json from Takeout opens on the same card: your visits, the sites you went to most each year and how many you typed in. Bookmarks.html opens as its folders of links.