·5 min read·Guides

How to export your YouTube watch history

A practical guide to downloading your watch history from Google Takeout and uploading it to Whimoway for personalised channel insights.

If you'd like Whimoway to show you how you actually use YouTube — which channels you watch most, when your interest in something started, what's been quietly creeping up in your viewing — you can upload your watch history.

The data lives in your Google account already. We just need to ask Google for a copy.

The whole thing takes about five minutes plus however long Google needs to prepare the file (usually a few minutes; sometimes longer for very large histories).

Why bother?

Your YouTube watch history is the most honest record of what you actually find interesting. It's better than your subscriptions, which tend to accumulate over years and reflect past curiosity rather than current attention.

Once you upload it, Whimoway can show you:

  • The channels you watch the most, including ones you're not subscribed to
  • When you first watched a channel and how your interest has changed
  • Subscriptions you never actually watch (cleanup candidates)
  • Channels you regularly watch but haven't formally added to your library

That last one is genuinely useful — no other YouTube surface tells you "you really like this person, you should probably subscribe."

What we do with the data

We store your watch events in our database, scoped to your account. We don't share them with anyone, sell them, or feed them into a recommendation engine. They power the per-channel insights you see inside Whimoway and nothing else.

You can delete all your watch history from Whimoway at any time from Settings → Watch history. One click and it's gone.

The raw Takeout file you upload never reaches our server. We parse it in your browser and only the structured event data — video id, channel id, timestamp, title — is sent to us.

The export

1. Open Google Takeout

Go to takeout.google.com/settings/takeout/custom/youtube. This pre-filters Takeout to YouTube data only, which saves a step.

If you're not signed in, Google will ask you to sign in to the same account you use for YouTube.

2. Narrow the export to history

Takeout offers to bundle a lot of YouTube data — comments, playlists, subscriptions, posts. We only need the watch history, so:

  • Click All YouTube data included
  • Click Deselect all
  • Tick only history
  • Click OK

This keeps the file small and the export fast.

3. Choose JSON format

Below the data section, find the Multiple formats option. Click it and change history from HTML to JSON. Whimoway accepts both formats but JSON is smaller, faster to parse, and slightly more reliable for older histories.

Click OK to confirm.

4. Create the export

Scroll down and click Next step.

Take the defaults: Send download link via email, Export once, .zip, and a sensible file size (the default is fine).

Click Create export.

5. Wait for the email

Google emails you when the export is ready. For a typical history this takes 2–10 minutes. For very heavy users with years of data it can take an hour. You don't have to keep the page open — just check your email.

When it arrives, click Download your files in the email. Sign in again if Google asks, then download the .zip.

6. Find watch-history.json

Open the zip. Inside is a folder structure that looks something like:

Takeout/
  YouTube and YouTube Music/
    history/
      watch-history.json

That last file is what you want.

7. Upload it to Whimoway

Open Settings → Watch history in Whimoway and drag watch-history.json into the upload area. Or click the area and pick the file.

Whimoway parses it in your browser and uploads the structured events to your account. For a typical history (tens of thousands of events) this takes 30 seconds to a couple of minutes. The progress indicator counts events as they go.

When it finishes, you'll see a summary: how many watches were imported, across how many channels, covering which date range. The new insights appear immediately on each channel's page.

A few small things

  • HTML format works too. If you accidentally chose HTML in step 3, the upload still works — Whimoway parses both formats. JSON is just smaller.
  • You can re-upload anytime. A fresh export overwrites nothing — it adds new events that weren't already imported. Old events are deduplicated automatically.
  • Big histories work. Histories of 100,000+ events upload fine. The parser runs in your browser and the events go to the server in batches.
  • Music history is separate. If you also export your YouTube Music listening history, Whimoway ignores it during the upload — we're scoped to YouTube videos.
  • You can always delete. One click in Settings removes every watch event from your account. The channel insights revert to the upload prompt.

If something goes wrong

If the upload fails partway through, you can re-run it. The parser deduplicates events that already exist on the server, so re-uploading the same file is safe.

If the parser doesn't recognise the file, double-check that you uploaded watch-history.json (or .html) from the history/ folder rather than one of the other Takeout files. The other files in the export — playlists.json, subscriptions.csv, etc. — have different shapes and Whimoway can't read them.

If you hit anything else, the developer is small enough to actually email — see the contact link in the footer.