You can create subtitles for your own YouTube videos yourself. A while back, you could even add subtitles in different languages ​​for other people’s videos. From now on, however, this is no longer possible. If you want to make these for your own videos, it’s pretty easy too.

How to Create YouTube Subtitles

First you log in to the Youtube studio on Youtube. You can find this by clicking on your profile picture at the top of YouTube. Now go to the menu item “Subtitles” on the left.

Now the site will show you all your videos. Select the video you want to create subtitles for. For new subtitles, now select “Add language”. If you want to edit already created subtitles, you can also select the appropriate language.

Then click “Add” under Subtitles. You can now add them from a file, sync them automatically, or enter them manually. The file must contain all the text that has been said, as well as timestamps, for YouTube to read.

If you work with “automatic sync”, just write the text that is in the video and YouTube puts it in the right place. You can edit the finer details afterwards. When typing manually, you write the text yourself and also place it by hand.

If you already have subtitles in the original language, you can also have them automatically translated here.

Quick Start Guide:

1. Go to the Youtube studio
2. Click the “Subtitles” menu item on the left
3. Choose the right video
4. Click Add Language
5. Then click on “add” under “subtitles”

Download YouTube Subtitles

If you want to download the subtitles of a specific video or copy them to a file on your computer, you have two options. The first of these involves less work.

This is a so called subtitle downloader like save subscribers. There are more, but this one worked well in our quick test. Here, just copy the URL of the video and press “download”. Now the site will create one file for all the subtitles present in the video.

You can then download it in SRT, VTT or TXT format.

Quick Guide Subtitle Downloader:

1. Go to savesubs.com
2. Paste the video URL into the search box and click “Download”
3. Download the subtitles in your preferred format

Copy subtitles from YouTube video

However, subtitle download websites are full of ads. You can also get the subtitles directly from YouTube, but that takes a little more work. To do this, first call up the video in your browser from which you want to extract the subtitles.

Now click on the three dots below the video and select “View Transcript”. Now YouTube will show you the subtitles including the timestamp. Below you can select the desired language. To save them in a file, you can copy and paste the subtitles line by line into a Word or other text document.

Quick guide to copy subtitles from Youtube:

1. Watch the video in the browser
2. Click on the three dots under the video
3. Select “View transcript”.
4. Copy and paste the text into a document

Photo instructions:

Cover photo: Unsplash / Alexander Shatov