YouTube Uploader Pro

YouTube Uploader Pro for Shorts: publish a vertical MP4 to your own channel from a URL

Give it a direct link to a vertical .mp4 and a title. It opens YouTube Studio in a real browser, signs in with your own session, fills in the upload wizard and hands back the video id and the Shorts URL.

Two things to know before you spend anything. It signs in as you, using cookies you export from your own browser, so the first run takes ten minutes of setup and the risk sits with your channel: driving Studio this way is against YouTube's terms. And whether YouTube files a clip as a Short is decided by the file, not by a tag. Square or taller, 180 seconds or less. #Shorts in the title changes nothing, and the decision cannot be undone after publishing, so the file is checked before it moves.

🎬 What YouTube Uploader Pro for Shorts does

It reads your file before it transfers it. Frame size, duration and container come off the first megabyte, so a landscape clip is turned away for a megabyte rather than five hundred. Three of those checks are yours to waive: a 1:1 source becomes a Short with roughly 40% of the frame as black bars, a short edge above 1080 px is quality nobody receives, and a Short over 60 seconds carrying somebody else's audio can be blocked worldwide by a claim after it is live. Each is refused by default, each has a box to tick.

Visibility defaults to private on purpose, and the run reads the radio button back off Studio before it presses Publish. If it cannot confirm the setting it saves a draft and refuses to publish, because clicking a radio and having it selected are two different things.

📥 What you give it

{
  "videoUrl": "https://cdn.example.com/clip.mp4",
  "title": "The 64 sugar cubes puzzle",
  "visibility": "private"
}

The twelve individual cookie fields underneath are a fallback. Anything in the cookies box wins.

📤 What you get back

One row per run, whatever happens. A published Short carries these:

A refusal writes one row too. This is a real one from a real run, with the long message cut short:

{
  "ok": false,
  "charged": null,
  "uploadFeeCharged": false,
  "errorCode": "SESSION_INCOMPLETE",
  "error": "SESSION_INCOMPLETE: the cookies you supplied do not add up to a Studio session. ...",
  "reason": "The cookies supplied do not add up to a YouTube Studio session. Nothing was uploaded, so no upload fee was charged ...",
  "hint": "Export the WHOLE youtube.com cookie list, not a few fields. ...",
  "platform": "youtube",
  "posted": false,
  "confirmed": false,
  "videoId": null,
  "watchUrl": null,
  "finalUrl": null,
  "diagnosedAt": "2026-08-24T23:31:23.917Z",
  "title": "x",
  "videoUrl": "https://httpbin.org/status/403",
  "format": "short"
}

🧾 Reading the output

The run itself still finishes as succeeded on a refusal, so read ok and errorCode rather than the run status. These are the codes about your file:

And these are about your session or Studio:

▶️ How to run it

1. Open YouTube Uploader Pro for Shorts and put your .mp4 where it is served as a file: S3, a CDN, an Apify key-value store record. 2. Export your cookies, following the four rows below exactly. This is the step people lose an hour to. 3. Paste both exports into YouTube session cookies, fill in Title, set Visibility, and start within a few minutes. 4. Read the row: a Shorts URL on success, an errorCode and a hint on a refusal. 5. After that leave the cookie box empty. The session is saved and refreshed on every run. Paste again only to switch account, or when a run says the session stopped working.

💰 How much does it cost?

$0.55 per published Short, plus $0.02 for each megabyte of video the run transfers.

Megabytes are counted on every attempt, so a transfer that breaks and restarts can bill more megabytes than the file holds. The publish fee is only charged once YouTube confirms the upload.

A landscape clip, a WebM or a file over 180 seconds is turned away on that first megabyte. No video bytes move on the sample row, or on a refusal that lands there, so neither carries megabytes or the publish fee.

💡 What people use it for

• Posting the vertical cut of something you already made, without opening Studio.
• Ending an editing pipeline with the upload itself, rather than a file in a bucket.
• Publishing to a schedule of your own from Apify, with visibility left private until you look.
• Posting to a second channel you manage, named by channelId so it cannot land on the wrong one.

🚧 What it does not do

• It cannot answer Google's "verify it's you" screen. That run stops at

SESSION_CHECKPOINT and publishes nothing. Clear the challenge in your own browser, then re-export.

• No scheduling, no category, no playlist. Those are deliberately left out here.
• MP4 and MOV only. WebM included in the refusals.
• One file per run.
• A rotation-flag vertical is refused, because YouTube reads the stored frame and would publish

it as a normal video with no warning.

• classifiedAsShort resolves within 45 seconds or reports null, since YouTube decides that

on its own clock. The video is live either way.

• One shape of file is judged only after the whole transfer: an MP4 whose moov atom sits at

the end, served by a host that ignores a range request. A SHORTS_* refusal then arrives with the megabytes already billed. Serve a faststart MP4 instead: ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -c copy -movflags +faststart out.mp4.

• Your saved session lives in a key-value store called youtube-uploader-sessions **in your own

Apify account**. No cookie value ever reaches a dataset row or the run's output store.

🧭 Which YouTube actor do you need?

❓ Questions people ask

Can I use the official API instead? Not usefully. A video uploaded through videos.insert from an unverified API project created after 28 July 2020 is locked to private forever, with no appeal on YouTube's own help pages. That is why there is no API mode here.

Where do my cookies go? Into your own Apify account, in the store named above, and into the browser this actor drives. Never to us.

Can I try it before pasting a session? Yes. Tick demoMode, or run it with no cookies on an account that has no saved session. You get one labelled sample row, no upload and no video bytes.

How do I switch channels? Paste the new account's export. Anything you paste wins outright and the saved session is not consulted on that run. Forget the saved session is a recovery hatch, not the way to switch.

Does deleting the saved session sign me out of Google? No. For that, sign the device out from Google's own Security page, which kills every copy of that session.

🆘 If something breaks

Open the Issues tab on the actor page with the run id and the row's errorCode. A LAYOUT_CHANGED row means Studio moved something and we need to hear about it.