Youtube History Analysis

This package locally downloads the metadata for all video in a user's Youtube history and performs a fun analysis. The results are then displayed in the browser.

Example

The final results of the analysis should look pretty similar to mine (circa 2016):

https://jessime.github.io/youtube_gh_pages/

Installation

This project requires Python 3.x.

Copy or clone this repo from Github.

Open the Terminal/Command Line and navigate to where you clone the repo:

$ cd path/to/cloned/directory

Then run:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

to install the dependencies.

Usage

To run the analysis, you first need to download your raw data from Google Takeout. Make sure YouTube and YouTube Music is checked and follow directions to download the zip file. It'll take 10-30 minutes to receive an email from Google saying your job is done. Unzip your downloaded file and pass it as a command line parameter:

$ python youtube_history.py --takeout /path/to/Takeout

The specific file we're looking for is YouTube and YouTube Music/history/watch-history.html. So make sure at least that one file exists in the Takeout directory.

Downloading with yt-dlp

As of 2024, we've upgraded to downloading video metadata using yt-dlp, which is the successor to youtube-dl. So far, it seems pretty stable, but we'll need more testing from other people to know for sure.

Running with a second Takeout

If you have another Takeout folder you want to analyses, specify a name for the results dir:

$ python youtube_history.py  --takeout /path/to/Takeout --name jill

Questions and Comments

Feel free to direct any questions or comments to the Issues page of the repository.