Group your Shorts series into playlists — how to create and manage them in Studio, limits when a playlist is Shorts-only, and playlist analytics (October 2026)

When you create one from the watch page and set it to private, only you can see it. The upload flow also has a “Playlist” item under Details, where YouTube says you can add the video to an existing playlist or create one.

• A playlist title can be up to 150 characters and a description up to 5,000 characters.
• Titles and descriptions can’t include invalid characters such as “<”, “>” or the line separator.
• There’s a limit to how many public playlists a channel can create each day across YouTube Music, the main YouTube app and the YouTube API. Gaining access to advanced features can raise it.
• If a video’s or channel’s audience is “made for kids” and you’re on a homepage, you can’t add it to a playlist. You can still add content from search results.

• YouTube “made for kids” setting

To change the title or description, click Details on the same Playlists tab, edit and Save. When you have many playlists, type keywords into the filter bar to find one by title.

1. Sign in to YouTube Studio, choose Content in the left menu and open the Playlists tab.
2. Hover over the playlist description you want to update and choose Edit on YouTube from the menu; the playlist opens in a new tab.
3. Drag videos up and down to reorder, use Share in the playlist details to share it, and use More → Collaborate to add collaborators.
4. To add videos, open the video’s details and choose More → Add videos; you can add from search, a URL or your library.

There’s a constraint to know about with Shorts-only playlists. YouTube says reordering (dragging videos) and temporarily reordering from the watch page’s playlist panel aren’t available for playlists that only contain YouTube Shorts. If the order of a series matters, you can plan the order you post in, or mix in a long video (that last part is our reading).

Inside a playlist you can filter by type with the All, Shorts and Videos chips, but the Shorts chip is available on computers only.

Advanced features such as translations may require a one-time verification first. For each playlist you can open the Overview, Content, Audience and Revenue tabs to see insights aggregated across every video in it, which is handy for comparing how a series performs.

1. In Studio’s Content → Playlists tab, open the playlist’s Details and click Languages in the left menu.
2. Under “Set language”, choose the playlist’s default language.
3. Click Add language on the right, choose a language, enter the translated title and description, and click Update.

• Shorts analytics and retention

For long conversational content, you can also designate an existing playlist as a podcast. In Studio’s Content → Playlists, open the playlist’s menu, choose “Set as podcast”, review the title, description and who can view it, add a square podcast thumbnail and click DONE. To undo it, go to Content → Podcasts and choose “Set as playlist”.

• Turning a podcast into Shorts

These are our own suggestions for using the settings above, not rules from YouTube.

• Put the series name and the topic together in the title, within the 150-character limit
• Use the first line of the description to say in one sentence what the series is
• Create it as private first, check the order and contents, then switch it to public
• Compare how each series performs in the playlist analytics
• Make sure no made-for-kids videos have been mixed in

Shortsmith’s Upload & schedule window has no field for choosing a playlist. After the video is up, add it to a playlist with Save on the watch page or in Studio. Shortsmith’s schedule posts at the chosen time with the chosen visibility, so tidy up once you see it has gone live.

For planning a series, making several Shorts at once in Shortsmith and spreading them across the week fits well. The weekly calendar shows which episode goes out on which day, so keeping the playlist order in step with your posting order keeps things easy to manage.

• Best time to post Shorts and scheduling