YouTube chapter timestamps from a transcript
If you have a transcript, you already have the timestamps. The work is spotting where the topic changes and giving each part a short title. Paste your transcript below and you get a draft list to edit, with a timestamp roughly every few minutes and the first words spoken at each one.
Draft timestamps from your transcript
Accepts the text you copy from YouTube's "Show transcript" panel, an SRT or VTT caption file, or any transcript with a timestamp at the start of each line. It runs in your browser and nothing is uploaded.
Now rewrite each line after the timestamp as a 2 to 6 word title. Then move any timestamp to the line where that topic actually starts. The transcript above shows you where.
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Step by step
- Get the transcript. On YouTube, open the video, click "...more" under the title, then "Show transcript", and copy the panel. Podcast hosts and editors (Descript, Riverside, Adobe Podcast, Otter) export SRT or VTT files with timestamps.
- Draft the list. Paste it above. A timestamp every 5 minutes suits a 30 to 60 minute episode. Use 2 to 3 minutes for short videos.
- Find the real topic changes. The drafts are evenly spaced, but topics aren't. Look for lines like "so the next thing...", "let's talk about...", a new question or a new guest segment, and move the timestamp there.
- Write short titles. Name what the viewer gets ("Pricing your first cake order"), not what happens on screen ("Maya talks"). 2 to 6 words is plenty.
- Check the rules. YouTube needs the first chapter at 00:00, at least 3 chapters, each at least 10 seconds long, listed in order. Paste the list into the YouTube chapters checker and it fixes what it can.
- Reuse it everywhere. The same list works in Spotify and Apple show notes. For Podcasting 2.0 apps, convert it with the chapter format converter or the chapters.json generator.
Why not let YouTube do it?
YouTube can add automatic chapters, but it often skips videos, and the titles are generic. Chapters you write yourself show up in search results as "key moments". They also give people a reason to jump straight to the part they came for instead of leaving. More on that in the podcast timestamps guide and the show notes template.