Upload Date for YouTube Shorts

About

See the exact upload date on every YouTube Short, and tell at a glance whether you're watching something from today, last week, or three years ago.

YouTube Shorts hide their upload dates. You scroll, watch, and have no idea if the trend you're seeing is fresh or recycled from years ago. Upload Date for YouTube Shorts puts the date back where you can see it — as a clean pill above each Short and a small overlay on every thumbnail in your home feed.

WHAT YOU GET
• A date pill above the title on every Shorts watch page — shows "5 hours ago", "Yesterday", or the full date (e.g. May 12, 2026) depending on how recent the upload is.
• An overlay on every Shorts thumbnail in the home feed and shelves — scan dozens of Shorts and instantly see which are new and which are old.
• A traffic-light dot beside every date — green = uploaded today, yellow = within the last week, red = older. Lets you assess freshness without reading.
• Pixel-perfect native styling — the pills are designed to feel like part of YouTube's own player chrome.

WHY YOU'LL USE IT
• Stop wasting time on recycled, months-old "trends"
• Verify how current a news clip really is before you share it
• Recognize when a creator is rerunning old content
• Find genuinely new uploads from your favorite channels
• Useful for research, journalism, content strategy, fact-checking, or just curiosity

YOU DEFINE WHAT "FRESH" MEANS
The options page lets you set your own day thresholds for the green and yellow dots. Want green only for Shorts uploaded in the last 24 hours? Set it. Want anything within 30 days to stay yellow? Set it. Settings save automatically and live entirely on your device.

PRIVACY YOU CAN VERIFY
This extension was built with privacy as its first design principle.
• Zero data collection. No analytics, no telemetry, no tracking, no fingerprinting.
• No backend. Nothing the extension reads ever leaves your computer.
• No remote code. The entire extension is a small bundle of JavaScript shipped to your browser — what you see is what you run.
• No cross-site permissions. It runs only on youtube.com.
• Local storage only. The two color thresholds you choose are saved with chrome.storage.local — they never sync to any Google account, never reach any server, and are removed when you uninstall.

Full privacy policy: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/9asdhf0w9j3po2j3ff2/bffe969ea0cf94fd4e0816409324830b/raw/PRIVACY.md

HOW IT WORKS
The extension reads upload-date metadata that YouTube itself embeds in every Shorts page. For thumbnails on the home page it performs a single same-origin fetch to read the same public metadata. Results are cached in memory for the page session and discarded when you close the tab. There is no scraping of private data, no API key, no logging.

PERMISSIONS
• Host: *://*.youtube.com/* — required to read upload-date metadata from the Shorts player and thumbnails. The extension does not touch any other site.
• storage — required only to save your two color-threshold preferences locally on your device.

That's the entire permission surface. No tabs, no scripting, no webRequest, no cookies, no <all_urls>.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Q: Does this show on regular YouTube videos?
A: No. Regular videos already display the upload date. This extension exists because Shorts hide it.

Q: Will it work in the YouTube mobile app?
A: No — Chrome extensions only run in Chrome, not in native apps. It will work on m.youtube.com if you open it in Chrome.

Q: Will it slow down YouTube?
A: No. The watch-page pill reads metadata YouTube has already loaded. The thumbnail overlays trigger a single cached fetch per Short — milliseconds, no perceivable lag.

Q: What if YouTube changes their layout?
A: Built with fallback selectors at every layer. If a future YouTube update breaks one entry point, the others keep working.

Q: Open source?
A: The full source is reviewable inside the .crx that Chrome installs — no minification, no obfuscation, no remote code.

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