How do I save YouTube Shorts for learning?

Shorts are made to be watched once. The feed moves on before a point has time to settle, and every swipe pushes the good one further back. A week later, when you finally need that tip about pricing a freelance job or fixing a sauce, getting back to it means digging through your watch history or guessing at search terms. The idea was worth keeping; nothing kept it.

YouTube does let you hold on to a Short. In current versions of the app you can save one to a playlist from its menu, and a Short you like can turn up in your Liked videos list. Both keep the clip itself. Neither writes down what the creator taught, and neither asks you about it a few days later, which is the step that turns a clever tip into something you can still explain next month.

Each Short has an address of its own, and that address is all scrollandlearn needs. In the YouTube app, Share sits in the column of buttons on the right side of the Short; tap it, then choose Copy link. On a computer, the address bar shows a link with /shorts/ in it, and you can copy it exactly as it is. Either form is read the same way as a link to a regular YouTube video.

1. Copy the link: tap Share on the Short and pick Copy link, or copy the /shorts/ address from your browser on a computer.
2. Add it to scrollandlearn: open the app, tap Add and paste the link. There is nothing else to fill in.
3. Give it a minute: the transcript is built from the Short's captions, and the lesson is usually ready within a minute.
4. Read what came back: a one-line core idea, the key points, Remember this as the single sentence to keep, a Try this when the Short suggests something to do, plus the transcript and a link back to the Short with the creator's handle.
5. Fix the topic if it is off: the lesson files itself into a topic named after what you keep saving. Tap Change to move it, or use New topic in the same sheet to start one with a name you choose.
6. Add a line in your words: My takeaway holds up to 500 characters on why this Short was worth keeping. The pencil opens Edit lesson, where you can rework the title, key points or quiz question.
7. Share straight from YouTube next time: on iPhone, tap Add to Shortcuts in scrollandlearn once, and the Shortcut is there whenever you tap Share on a Short. On Android, install scrollandlearn from Chrome first (Install and create shortcut in Chrome's menu), and it then appears in the share sheet.

A lot of Shorts are clips cut from podcasts and long interviews, a single answer lifted out of an hour of talk. Below is an example of the lesson a clip like that becomes: one idea, the reasoning behind it and the question the quiz will put to you later.

scrollandlearn reads a Short through its caption track, the same captions a viewer can switch on in the player. When a Short has them, in whatever language, they become the transcript and the lesson is written from that text. The speech itself is never transcribed from a YouTube link, so a Short where someone talks clearly but has no caption track still gives no lesson.

One trap belongs to Shorts in particular. Many creators add large subtitles in their editing app, so the words appear on screen as part of the picture. Those are not a caption track, and the app does not read words off a video's frames, so a Short can look fully subtitled and still come back without a lesson. The same goes for a Short of music with lines typed over it: the words live in the picture, and there is usually nothing in the captions to write a lesson from.

You can't always tell from the feed which kind you are looking at, so the fastest check is to paste the link. Either the lesson arrives, or the app says it needs the video file.

A Short without captions, a private Short and a removed one all end the same way from their link: no lesson, and nothing guessed from the title. For the first two, Upload the video accepts a file of up to 50 MB, and that file is transcribed so the lesson can be written. In practice you have the file when the Short is yours and the original clip is still on your phone or in your editing app.

Uploading does not rescue a Short that is only music. The same clip still has no words to build a lesson from, so leave those in your Liked videos. A deleted Short can't be read at all, and a link that failed for some other reason can be run again with Try again.

A lesson is written from the whole transcript, so a Short with captions reaches the lesson from its first word to its last. When a Short is a clip from a longer video and you want the rest of the argument, paste the full video's link too: it becomes a lesson of its own, in sections when the video is long.

The captions can be in any language. The language of the lesson is set in Settings > Lesson language: a new account writes lessons in English, Croatian is the other fixed choice, and Same as the post keeps the language the Short was recorded in.

Saving was the easy half. Today's quiz asks a few questions about the lessons that are due that day, each one written from a lesson, and on a day with nothing due there is no quiz. You think of the answer, tap Show answer and grade yourself with Forgot, Kind of or Knew it. That grade decides when the lesson returns.

Shorts fit this rhythm well, because most of them carry exactly one idea, and one idea makes a clean question. Quiz this topic runs the questions for a single subject, and the knowledge score on each topic shows the share of lessons you remembered among those that have come up.

• Copy during the scroll. If a Short made you stop, grab its link before the next swipe, because the feed will not show it to you again.
• Keep the ones that teach a step. Jokes, trailers and reactions rarely make a lesson worth a quiz question.
• Prefer Shorts where someone explains out loud. Speech is what automatic captions come from, so those are the ones most likely to have a caption track.
• When three Shorts make the same point, keep the clearest and put what the other two added in My takeaway.
• Search before you save twice. Search looks through titles, key points and the exact words of transcripts, so a tip you already have turns up with the passage around it.