YouTube Chapter Generator

How to add chapters to a YouTube video

Chapters are a list of timestamps in your description, one per line, starting at 0:00. That is the whole format, and formatting it was never the hard part.

The tedious part is getting the numbers: play, pause, squint at the time, write it down, type it out, rewind because you overshot, repeat fifteen times.

That is the part this replaces. Paste your video link, play it, and hit Mark chapter here every time a new section starts. The player pauses, the timestamp is captured, and the cursor lands in the title box so you can name it and keep going. Press <kbd>M</kbd> instead if your hands are already on the keyboard.

Click any timestamp afterwards to jump the player back to that exact point.

YouTube chapter rules, and why chapters do not show

Chapters are the only part of a description with hard requirements and no error message. Get one thing wrong and YouTube does not warn you, does not partially apply them, and marks nothing in the studio. It simply shows no chapters.

All four are checked live, and the tool names the one you broke instead of telling you something is wrong. The video length is read from the player, so even the last chapter gets measured, which is the one most tools cannot check.

Importing timestamps you already wrote

If you wrote your timestamps somewhere else, paste them in and they become editable markers. Any format is read, including 0:00 - Intro, [0:00] Intro and Intro 0:00, and the list comes back sorted.

How to write YouTube chapter titles

The rules only decide whether chapters appear. Whether they help is a separate question, and titles do that work.

"Part 2" tells a viewer nothing. "Why the first export failed" tells them whether to jump. Keep them short enough to read at a glance in the progress bar, and write the thing that happens rather than the section number.

Once the video is published, the embed code generator builds the iframe for putting it on your own site.

Google occasionally lifts individual chapters into search results as Key Moments, which turns one video into several entry points. That only happens when the titles describe something specific, which is one more reason not to write "Part 2".