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How to see which of your hidden YouTube videos will be private with the YouTube Studio app

Google has just announced a change in the visibility of YouTube videos. Videos uploaded before January 1, 2017 with hidden visibility will be made private unless you take action. We tell you how to see which of your videos are affected by this change.

Google introduced a improved security in the way links work to hidden YouTube videos in 2017. It is automatically applied to all videos uploaded since then, and now the company intends to apply its improvements to previous videos or hide them. Although there are options to keep them as they were.

What about hidden YouTube videos

When uploading a video to YouTube, you have three options to choose your visibility: public, hidden or private. Public videos are visible to anyone who searches for them or enters your channel; Hidden videos do not appear in the channel although they can be accessed through their direct link or if they are embedded in an app or web; private videos are only for your eyes and people you choose by hand (up to 50 maximum).

The change affects hidden videos uploaded before 2017, which will go into hiding from July 23 unless their creators take action. Google has promoted this change to promote a security measure in the mode in the links of private videos, which makes them more difficult to find out by someone with whom you have not shared the link. Videos uploaded since 2017 already take advantage of this security change.

The change is optionalAlthough the default setting assumes that hidden videos are made private, so it is to be expected that as of July 23, many of them will virtually disappear, unless those who uploaded them take action. There are four steps they can take:

  • Do nothing. Hidden videos uploaded before 2017 will become private as of July 23, so no one other than the author will be able to view them, other than the people you share the video with manually, with a maximum of up to 50 people, each with your Google account .. If they are included in a web or application, they will give an error.

  • Leave everything as is. Those who want to keep the videos hidden as they were and with their links that do not take advantage of security improvements, can do so by filling out a form. Google recommends this option for those who use hidden videos as public, for example for promotional videos from Google Play.

  • Make the videos public. Another option is to change the privacy settings of these videos to public. They will then appear in the channel and in searches, they will be visible to everyone and will work without problems if they are included in websites or applications.

  • Upload the video again. A somewhat radical option is to re-upload the video again and set it to hidden. In this case, security enhancements will be taken advantage of, although all video statistics such as views or comments will be lost. Also, if the video is included in applications or websites, the link will need to be updated.

How to see if the change affects your videos

If you’ve been uploading videos to YouTube for a few years now, this change may mean that some of your videos become virtually invisible starting next month. If you want to check which of your videos it affects, you can do so through a special link that opens the YouTube Studio website with the precise filtering options that include hidden videos before 2017.

With the official YouTube Studio app you can achieve something similar, with the exception that there is currently no filter by dates. To see your videos affected by the change, open YouTube studio and in the ☰ panel tap on Videos. In the list that is displayed, tap Visibility and check the box Hidden to filter hidden videos from your account.

Hidden Videos

By default, the videos are sorted chronologically, so you’ll find the oldest ones at the bottom. Videos 4 years or more ago they should be affected by the change.

To make sure 100% that this is the case, tap on the video and you can then see exactly the date it was uploaded, below the title. Also, if you tap on the pencil icon you will see that in the visibility settings it says Hidden – Without the latest security update. These videos will become private as of July 23, 2021.

Hidden

As we mentioned before, you have several options if you want this not to happen: fill in the Google form to leave everything as it was, change the visibility to public or upload the video again. The last two can be done from the YouTube Studio application itself, and the first can be completed without problems from your mobile.

More information | Google

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