Subscription Importer

Imports subscriptions from an xml/rss feed file into a youtube account. This is useful for transferring youtube subscriptions from one youtube account to another.

Usage

1. Get the properly formatted xml file from the account you wish to transfer subscriptions from

   • Go to Subscriptions
   • Go to Manage Subscriptions
   • Scroll to end of page
   • Click Export Subscriptions next to Export to RSS readers

2. Get authenticated, since this requires access to your google account you must generate the correct client_secrets.json file

   • Create project in the Developer Console
   • Next register for YouTube API, go to the project you just created and in the Developer Console.
   • Go to the API Library and turn YouTube Data API to ON.
   • Download JSON credentials, go to Credentials if not created already, create one must be OAuth 2.0. Select the created credential and click on Download JSON.
   • Rename the downloaded JSON file to client_secrets.json and drag into this root directory, must be in the same folder as subscribe.py.

3. Make sure all required packages are installed before running

   To do this I recommend using a virtual environment.

   $ virtualenv -p python3 env
   $ source env/bin/activate
   $ pip install -r requirements.txt
   

4. Run the script

   To do this either drag the exported xml file from step 1 into this root directory and name it subscriptions.xml or run the script with this argument

   $ python3 subscribe.py --xml /path/to/xml/file.xml

Limitations

There is a request cap every few hours, I believe the cap is around ~70 subscriptions per few hours. So you may have to run the script several times before being able to fully import everything. I have not yet figured out a way around this.