YouTube retired Clips: what was lost, and what to use instead

On 17 April 2026 YouTube retired the viewer Clips button and replaced it with Share at Timestamp. The replacement does less, in one specific way, and that way is the whole point.

7 October 2026

What Clips did

Clips let any viewer, not only the uploader, take a short section out of a video and share it as its own object with a start, an end and a description. The person receiving it saw that section and nothing else. It was the only native way to send someone a moment rather than a video with a suggestion about where to look.

What replaced it

Share at Timestamp. It sets a start time and drops you into the full video from there. YouTube said so directly in the announcement thread:

In the same post, YouTube pointed people outward, to “a number of third-party tools with advanced clipping features”. Existing Clips still play; you simply cannot make new ones.

Worth knowing if you were considering a workaround: YouTube playlists once accepted a start and end per item. Those API fields are now documented as deprecated, and their values are ignored. A playlist chains whole videos, not moments.

Why YouTube retired it

Nothing was published beyond the announcement itself, so what follows is read off the shape of the decision rather than off the record. Take it as reasoning, not as reporting.

A clip page was a short-tail surface. Somebody arrived, watched thirty seconds and left. There was no recommendation rail to carry them into a second video and no comment thread to hold them there. Almost every other surface YouTube runs exists to produce the next view, and a clip produced an exit.

Clips also sat awkwardly on the question of who decides. The uploader made the video, a viewer chose the thirty seconds that travelled, and the object that went out carried the viewer's title rather than theirs. Shorts answers the same short-form question in the opposite direction: the creator picks the moment, keeps the surface and can be paid for it. Running a viewer-curated format alongside a creator-curated one means maintaining two answers to one question, and only one of them had an ad slot.

The last signal is in the note itself. It pointed outward, to third-party tools, rather than inward to another YouTube feature. Platforms rarely route people off the platform. That reads less like a feature being replaced and more like a job being handed over.

So what was actually lost

Four things, and they are separable. An end point, so the thing stops where the moment stops. A description, so you could say what to watch for. A dedicated object, so what arrived was the moment rather than the whole video. And a preview that showed there was a moment at all: a clip link pasted into a chat opened out into something you could press, while a timestamp link shows the thumbnail of a long video and no sign that any particular part of it matters.

We restore the first three. The fourth we restore in part and it is worth being exact about which part: a Playback link unfurls as a card showing the moment and what you said about it, which is more than a long-video thumbnail and less than a player you can press without leaving the conversation. Nobody outside YouTube can give you that last one, because the inline player was YouTube's own surface.

What everything else in this space is for

Four kinds of tool get recommended when people ask what replaced Clips, and they are not competing with each other. They produce different objects.

Share at Timestamp is for the case where the rest of the video is the point. You want somebody to begin at 4:12 and keep going. It is native, it is instant, it works on a phone, and for that job nothing beats it.

The AI clippers, Opus Clip and VEED and CapCut among them, are for a creator mining their own catalogue. They read a long video, pick the passages likely to perform, crop them to vertical and export files you upload to Shorts, Reels or TikTok. The output is a file and the input is usually footage you own. That is a production pipeline, and it is a good one.

Download and re-encode is what almost the entire open-source long tail does. We went looking, and every indie tool in this space that handles several moments at once works the same way: fetch the file, cut it, render a new one, host the result somewhere. It works. The cost is that a copy now exists, the original creator gets no view from it, and whoever hosts it owns the problem when the rights holder notices.

And then there is the shape Clips actually had, which none of the three above reproduce: a pointer rather than a copy. Clips never moved a frame of anybody's video. It recorded where to look and let YouTube do the playing, which is why the view still counted for the person who made it. That is the shape we build, and it is the reason a Playback cannot be deleted out from under the creator who earned it.

Which tool does which job

• You want a start and an end→Loop is the direct replacement. Press once where it starts, once where it ends, and share the link. Add a note if it needs one.
• You want to say what to watch for→A Playback carries a title and your take, and comments pin to the exact frame they are about. This is the description Clips used to have, with more room.
• You want several moments in one link→A Cut holds up to twelve moments from as many as six videos, in an order you choose. Clips never did this.
• You want several at once→Compare holds up to four moments side by side on one timeline.

If you used to make Clips

The muscle memory transfers, and it is shorter than it was. Clips took a right-click, a dialogue, a drag on a miniature bar and a title you had to write before it would let you finish.

1. 1Paste the link. Open Loop and paste any YouTube URL. It opens already repeating, with no account and nothing to install.
2. 2Mark the two points. Press Start loop where the moment begins and End loop where it ends. Drag either handle to move an edge afterwards, which Clips never let you do.
3. 3Copy the link and send it. The start, the end, the speed and your note travel inside it, so whoever opens it lands on the moment rather than on a timestamp they have to trust.

If the moment needs explaining rather than repeating, make it a Playback instead and it gets a title, your take and comments pinned to the exact frame they are about. That is the custom description Clips carried, with somewhere for the conversation to land.

Making one on a phone

Clips on a phone meant a miniature bar and a fingertip. Here the video opens full screen with ten seconds already marked from wherever your link pointed, so the first thing you do is adjust rather than start from nothing.

1. 1Drag the two white handles to set the start and the end. Drag the space between them to move the whole moment.
2. 2Hold a handle still and the bar zooms in around it. Slide your finger down below the bar while dragging and it moves slower, down to a tenth of the speed, for the last fraction of a second.
3. 3Tap a length (5, 10, 15, 30 or 60 seconds) to set it in one go, or tap the times to type them exactly.
4. 4If the video has chapters, they sit under the bar as chips. One tap moves your moment to the start of that chapter.
5. 5The play button plays your moment on a loop, so you hear exactly what you are sending. Then press Next, give it a title, and publish.

On a computer the same moment takes two presses: Start where it begins and End where it stops, while the video plays. The times can be typed there too, and a video's chapters show under the timeline as jump points.

Your old Clips still work here

Existing youtube.com/clip links still play on YouTube, and Playback reads them. Paste one into Loop or Cut and the start and end come across with it, so a clip you made years ago becomes something you can extend, slow down, annotate or chain to others.

Nothing is copied, and what follows from that

One rule shapes everything here: no frame of anybody's video is ever downloaded, copied or re-encoded. A moment is a pointer into YouTube's own player, which is what makes the view count for the person who made it and what keeps a rights problem from ever arriving on our side.

Three things follow from it honestly. There is no file at the end, because nothing is rendered. The parts of a Cut meet at a hard cut rather than a dissolve, because a dissolve is a render. And a video whose owner has switched embedding off cannot be played here, which is the wall every embed-based tool meets. Those are the terms of the trade, and the trade is a good one.

A fair word about the replacement

Share at Timestamp is not a bad feature. It is fast, it is native, it works on mobile, and for “look at this bit” it is genuinely enough. If that is all you need, use it. The gap is narrow and specific: the moment has no end, so what you actually send is the whole video with a hint.