this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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Get YouTube share URL sans tracking query param (www.icloud.com)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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When you copy the URL for sharing in YouTube, it adds a query parameter now, so=blah, for tracking the source. This removes that. It could of course be smarter and stop at either the end or the next parameter, but since I haven’t seen any extras, I just remove everything after.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Or, you could just remove the "si" parameter from the link manually....

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yes, there are many things one could do manually that could otherwise be done with automation, but here we are… in an automation community.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Thats fair, I didn't realize that as I was reading all.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

This is great, thanks! I was about to build one of these. Now I’ll have to make a more complex one :-)

Ideas for my more complex version:

  • Handle original and shorts URLs
  • Return cleaned original URL & Piped.video URL
  • Bonus: handle multiple URLs simultaneously

Use case:

Someone posts a YouTube URL and a YouTube shorts URL in a Lemmy comment, both with the tracking parameter. I copy the comment to clipboard and run the shortcut. My clipboard is populated with a clean YouTube URL, the second clean YouTube URL (instead of the initial shorts syntax), and a piped.video mirror of each link. It may prepend a comment like “Hey, Google snuck some trackers onto your links, so I used a little script on my phone to remove them for us:”

Tap to see the instructions a language model couldn’t follow when I tried the other day :)Create an iOS shortcut that performs the following actions:

  1. Takes a URL, such as example URL 1 or example URL 2.
  2. Removes the identifier at the end, as seen in Example identifier one.
  3. Returns Example output URL 1 and Example output URL 2.

Example URL 1:

https://youtube.com/shorts/hJClg5QBBcA?si=ULI0ulElvw2Z1ooe

Example URL 2:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=hJClg5QBBcA?si=ULI0ulElvw2Z1ooe

Example identifier 1:

?si=ULI0ulElvw2Z1ooe

Example output URL 1:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=hJClg5QBBcA

Example output URL 2:

https://piped.video/watch?v=hJClg5QBBcA

At the end of the day, the shortcut must be able to automatically identify and subsequently handle either one regular YouTube URL or one YouTube shorts URL at a time. It must be able to strip the unique identifier found at the end of the provided URL. It must return a regular YouTube URL and a Piped mirror.