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Get YouTube share URL sans tracking query param

Shortcuts

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/51caa80475614a61a3c31764ba2f2f99

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.

4 comments

stoy

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

theherk

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

stoy

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

brbposting

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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:”

::: spoiler 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:

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