How I use YouTube’s timestamp feature to share perfect clips

YouTube is an easy program to use. But there are a bunch of shortcuts and tricks that you still need to learn if you want more than just basic proficiency.

One trick I’ve learned recently is how to send a YouTube video link at a specific timestamp. It’s super useful when I want a colleague to see exactly where something happens in a video without them having to laboriously search through the video for that point.

There are two ways I can do this: One is I can simply right-click on a YouTube URL at the point in the video I want to highlight and select Copy video URL at current time, or else I can manually enter the timestamp at the end of the URL in the format &t=ymxxs where y is the minute value and xx is the seconds.

Dominic Bayley / Foundry

The manual way has several advantages in that it works on your cellphone too, whereas the right-click function only works on a computer. Plus, if you’re, say, batch editing URLs for a website and want your videos to start at specific points, you can do it more quickly this way.

What to do:

For this example, I’ll use the PCWorld YouTube channel video