If you’re running a YouTube channel, you might want to clean up early uploads. Older YouTube videos may need to be hidden, unlisted, or even deleted to keep your channel up to date. Here’s how to hide, unsubscribe, or delete a YouTube video.
How to hide or deselect videos on YouTube
YouTube lets you set the videos you upload as private, which lets you choose who has access to see them. You can also unlist videos, keeping them visible to users who link to them, while hiding them from your channel list and YouTube search results.
To do this, open your video on the YouTube desktop website and press the “Edit Video” button. You will need to be signed in to the Google Account associated with your channel.
This will open the “Video Details” menu in YouTube Studio, the built-in video editing tool. This allows you to change the title, thumbnail, target audience, and visibility options of your videos.
Soon: How to use YouTube’s new Creator Studio
Set a video as private or unlisted
To change the visibility of your video to private or unlisted, tap the “Visibility” drop-down menu on the right side of the “General” tab.
To set a video as private, select the “Private” option. If you want to unlist the video, choose “Unlisted” instead.
Click the “Done” button to confirm.
Select the “Save” button at the top of the window to update your video visibility settings.
You can also quickly change the visibility of your YouTube videos in the “Videos” tab of YouTube Studio.
In the “Visibility” column, select the drop-down menu next to a video to change its visibility to public, private, or unlisted.
The visibility setting will be immediately applied to your video.
Sharing unlisted or private YouTube videos
For other people to see unlisted video, you need to share the direct link to the video. The video will remain hidden from your channel list and YouTube search.
For private videos, you will need to invite other Google Account users to view them. You can do this by tapping the hamburger menu icon at the top right of the “Video Details” edit page, next to the “Save” button.
From there, click on the “Share privately” option.
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This will open a new tab with the option to share your video at once with multiple Google user accounts.
Type email addresses in the “Share with others” box, separating each address with a comma. If you want to send a notification to users, leave the “Notify by email” checkbox enabled, otherwise tap it to uncheck and disable it.
Once you’ve added the accounts to share your video with, click the “Save and Return to YouTube Studio” button.
You can return to this menu at any time to remove shared access from private videos.
Accounts with access to view private video will be listed at the top of the “Share with others” box – select the “X” icon next to their names or tap the “Delete all” link to remove all users viewing your video.
If you are removing users from viewing your video, you will need to select the “Save and Return to YouTube Studio” button to save your updated sharing options.
How to delete a YouTube video
If you want to remove a YouTube video from your channel, you can do so from the “Videos” tab in YouTube Studio.
The Videos tab lists all the videos uploaded to your YouTube channel. To delete a video, hover over “Videos” and click on the three-dot menu icon.
Select the “Delete Forever” option to begin the deletion process.
YouTube will ask you to confirm whether or not you want to delete the video.
Click to check the “I understand that the deletion is permanent and cannot be undone” checkbox to confirm this, then select “Delete forever” to remove the video from your channel.
If you want to make a backup of your video first, select the “Download video” option.
Once you click the “Delete Forever” button, the video will be completely erased from your YouTube channel and cannot be recovered.
