It's incredibly frustrating to open a painstakingly crafted playlist on YouTube and see the dreaded message: "Unavailable videos are hidden." You might also see "One or more videos have been removed from the playlist because they were deleted from YouTube." How are you supposed to remember every video that you added to a playlist?
Thankfully, there are a few ways to find the title of a deleted YouTube video. Let's look at how to see what the deleted videos were, and a few ways to help when this happens in the future.
How to See the Title of a Deleted YouTube Video
As you know, when you open a deleted video, the page doesn't give you much information on what it was. You can't see the video title, channel name, upload date, or anything else that would help you identify it.
Thankfully, there are a few ways that you can hopefully recover this information.
See Deleted Video Titles via a Google Search
As it turns out, the most reliable way to see a deleted YouTube video's name is by simply performing a Google search for its URL. Since you still have access to the URL via your playlist, you can use that to see what else the internet knows about it.
Start by opening the playlist containing the deleted video. By default, YouTube will hide unavailable videos, as the message states. To get around this, click the three-dot button on the left side of the playlist and choose Show unavailable videos. This will add entries with [Deleted video] or [Private video]; if you click one, you'll see the reason why it's no longer available.
Open the video that you can't view, and you'll get a URL like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfT8jrKB2Uc&list=PL74egAjYUXGrvPKdcNry9IfyqgLraikbu&index=6&t=1s
The unique video identifier is the part after v= and before &list, so in this case, you'd want to copy HfT8jrKB2Uc
. Then, simply paste this into a Google search and see what comes up:
Hopefully, you'll be able to see what the title of the deleted video was. If that doesn't work, check the Images tab to see if you can find the video thumbnail. If your search brings up too many results, try putting the video ID in quotes so Google only shows exact matches for it (one of many great advanced Google search tricks).
Google may have a copy of the page in its cache, in some cases. In the above example, the video was embedded on an alternative video site, though since it's a YouTube embed, it's unavailable too. Once you have the title, try searching for it to see if there are any copies on YouTube or other video sites.
Find Out What Video Was Deleted on Archive.org
You might already be familiar with Archive.org, a site dedicated to preserving content on the internet. It takes snapshots of websites so you can see what they looked like at a certain point in the past.
While the service can't archive every single page on YouTube, there's a chance that it saved a copy of the video page you're interested in before it was deleted. To check, head to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and enter the URL of the video you want to check.
Make sure to strip any extraneous info at the end, such as playlist codes. Thus if you have a URL like this from earlier:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfT8jrKB2Uc&list=PL74egAjYUXGrvPKdcNry9IfyqgLraikbu&index=6&t=1s
Enter this instead:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfT8jrKB2Uc
After you enter the URL, if the service has it saved, you'll see Saved X times between certain dates. Click one of the dates on the calendar at the bottom to see how the page looked at that time. If one date doesn't work, try another.
For most YouTube videos, Archive.org won't have the actual video saved, so you can't watch it. (In this case, the video is available.) However, as long as it archived the page, you can see the title, channel, upload date, and even the description. As above, try using this information to see if you can locate the video elsewhere.
You'll have the best results with this method if the video was available on YouTube for some time. Videos that were quickly deleted after uploading probably didn't have time to archive.
Why Do Videos Get Deleted From YouTube?
Unfortunately, YouTube videos become unavailable all the time for a variety of reasons. These include the following:
- The owner makes them private: Private videos still exist on YouTube, but are only accessible to their owner and people they specifically invite. Channels often set videos as private when they don't want people to watch them anymore, but also don't want to delete the video and lose the stats associated with it.
- The owner deletes the video: Sometimes a channel owner deletes a video in cases where they need to re-upload a copy with corrections or additional edits.
- The channel no longer exists: If a channel owner deletes their account or has it terminated due to violating YouTube's rules, all its uploaded videos disappear with it.
- The video received a copyright claim: If a video contains large amounts of copyrighted content, the intellectual property owner can file a claim on the video and potentially make it unavailable.
- The video contains inappropriate content: In some cases, YouTube will remove a video if it breaks the site's terms of service. This can happen for explicit material or videos containing illegal content.
How to Avoid Losing YouTube Videos in the Future
Of course, there's no way to prevent a channel from deleting its own video. However, you can take a few steps to make it easier to remember what a YouTube video was if it does get deleted.
YouTube used to let you add a note to videos you have saved in playlists, but this is no longer available. Thus, you'll need to turn to a third-party tool to help you keep track of deleted videos from your playlists. The best one for the job is RecoverMy.Video.
Open the page and click Create free account, then sign up for the service. You'll then be walked through granting read-only access for the site to read what's in your YouTube playlists, which it uses to record their names.
Now, you have a copy of what's in your YouTube playlists. When you return to the site and log in, you'll see recently deleted videos that the service recovered. There are shortcuts to search for the video on the services mentioned above. The Lost tab collects anything that was deleted in your playlists before you signed up for the service, with the same shortcuts to make your research easier.
The service has a few other tools, too. Use the Channel tab to quickly see your data in the service, change which playlists are monitored, and even export them to CSV. On the Profile page at the top-right, you can enable email notifications as a summary of what's been saved for you.
This is a great way to keep track of videos without having to manually take notes. You won't have to guess what a video was anymore!
Recover Deleted YouTube Video Titles With Ease
Now you have several methods to figure out what video was deleted from your YouTube playlists. It's a frustrating problem, but due to YouTube's ubiquity, the information from its videos is usually available elsewhere.
If you're a YouTube fanatic, make sure you know about other YouTube tricks that help you master using the site.