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.

Input	A public direct link to a vertical .mp4, a title, and your own YouTube session
Output	One row per run, with the video id and the Shorts URL
Ceiling	512 MB per file, 180 seconds, 1080 px short edge
Account needed	Your own YouTube channel, signed in with your own cookies
Price	$0.55 per published Short, plus $0.02 for each megabyte transferred

🎬 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"
}

Field	Default	What it is
videoUrl	none	A public https:// link to the file itself, not a page with a player on it. You host it.
title	none	Cut to YouTube's 100 characters, and the log says by how much. A blank one is refused: Studio pre-fills the box with your filename, so blank would publish a Short called video.mp4.
description	none	Cut to 5,000 characters. Keep hashtags to 15 or fewer.
tags	[]	Optional. A minor signal on Shorts next to the title and the first few frames.
visibility	private	public, unlisted or private.
madeForKids	false	YouTube's COPPA audience declaration. It binds you, not this actor.
channelId	none	The UC... id, not an @handle. Use it when the account runs several channels: Studio redirects silently, so the run stops with WRONG_CHANNEL instead of publishing to the wrong one.
thumbnailUrl	none	Best effort. Custom thumbnails need a phone-verified channel; on an unverified one the row reports thumbnailApplied: false rather than pretending.
allowSquare	false	Upload a 1:1 source instead of refusing it.
allowAboveTargetResolution	false	Upload a source whose short edge is above 1080 px.
containsThirdPartyAudio	false	Tick it when the audio is not yours. It turns a Short over 60 seconds into a refusal rather than a warning.
verifyShortsClassification	true	After publishing, watches for up to 45 seconds to see whether YouTube filed it under /shorts/.
cookies	none	Your session, pasted once. See below. Marked secret.
resetProfile	false	Deletes the saved session before anything reads it. Only does anything when you paste a fresh export in the same run.
proxyConfiguration	Apify network on	The country is worth matching to where you exported. Your own servers in proxyUrls are used as given. Your video file is always fetched straight from your URL.
demoMode	false	Forces the labelled sample row. Nothing is uploaded and no video bytes move.

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:

Field	What it is
videoId, watchUrl, shortsUrl, studioEditUrl	Where the Short now lives
visibilityConfirmed, madeForKids, thumbnailApplied, tagsApplied	What was confirmed on the page, rather than what you asked for
durationSec, width, height, videoBytes, videoMegabytes	What was read off your file
classifiedAsShort, classificationNote	Whether YouTube filed it under /shorts/. true or null, never false
warnings	Things worth knowing that did not stop the run

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

Row	How to spot it	What happened
A published Short	ok: true with a videoId and a shortsUrl	It is on your channel
The sample row	_sample and _demo, ids reading SAMPLE00000	Nothing was uploaded
A refusal	ok: false with an errorCode, reason and hint	Nothing was published

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:

Code	What happened
SHORTS_TOO_LONG	Over 180 seconds. Past that it stays long-form however you tag it.
SHORTS_NOT_VERTICAL	Landscape. It never becomes a Short at any length.
SHORTS_SQUARE_SOURCE	Exactly 1:1. Tick Allow square (1:1) source if you meant it.
SHORTS_ROTATION_METADATA	Stored landscape, vertical only by a rotation flag. YouTube reads the stored frame.
SHORTS_RESOLUTION_TOO_HIGH	Short edge above 1080 px. Tick Allow above-target resolution to send it.
SHORTS_COPYRIGHT_CLIFF	Over 60 seconds with Contains third-party audio ticked.
UNPROBEABLE_CONTAINER	Not MP4 or MOV, so the duration and frame cannot be read. WebM, Matroska, AVI, FLV, Ogg, WMV and the MPEG streams all land here. Re-encode.
UNSUPPORTED_CONTAINER	The same verdict reached after the file arrived, when the first-megabyte probe could not run.
VIDEO_TOO_SMALL, NO_VIDEO_TRACK	Under 2 KB, or audio with no picture.
VIDEO_UNAVAILABLE	The file could not be fetched: a bad status, a timeout, zero bytes, or an HTML page where the video should be.
OVERSIZED_VIDEO	Above the 512 MB ceiling, or this run's Maximum total charge (USD) does not cover it. The message says which.
BAD_INPUT	A missing or non-https videoUrl, a missing title, a channelId that is not a UC... id, or unreadable cookies.

And these are about your session or Studio:

Code	What happened
SESSION_INCOMPLETE	The pasted cookies do not add up to a Studio session.
SESSION_INVALID, SESSION_EXPIRED	The cookies were not accepted, or Google served its sign-in page. Re-export both sets and run within a few minutes.
SESSION_CHECKPOINT	Google served a "verify it's you" challenge. Clear it in your own browser, then re-export.
BROWSER_GATE	Google's sign-in form refused the browser. The session was not accepted, so re-export that.
WRONG_CHANNEL	The session landed on a channel other than the channelId you asked for.
VISIBILITY_UNCONFIRMED	The visibility could not be read back, so a draft was saved instead of publishing.
DAILY_LIMIT	The channel's own 24-hour upload cap.
UPLOAD_REJECTED	YouTube refused the file after it arrived, quoting its own sentence.
UPLOAD_UNCONFIRMED	Publish was clicked and Studio never confirmed. Look in Studio before retrying: a blind retry can double-post.
LAYOUT_CHANGED	A step in Studio answered no selector this actor knows. Tell us.
NETWORK, TIMED_OUT, INTERNAL	The run could not reach YouTube, ran out of time, or hit something unexpected.

▶️ 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.

Step	What to do	Why
1	Install Cookie-Editor in Chrome, open chrome://extensions, Details, set access to On all sites	Without it the export silently omits SID, HSID and APISID, and still looks complete
2	Sign in to the right channel, go to https://www.youtube.com/robots.txt, Export to JSON	A plain text page cannot re-mint a cookie between your export and your paste
3	Go to https://myaccount.google.com/ in the same window, Export to JSON again	The extension only ever exports the tab's own domain, and the upload passes through both
4	Paste both blocks in the one box and start within a few minutes	Two cookies in the jar are re-minted about every ten minutes

💰 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?

If you want	Use
To publish a vertical clip as a Short	This one
To publish long-form, with category, playlist and scheduling	YouTube Uploader Pro for Videos
A plainer upload from a URL	YouTube Video Uploader
To download a video, its audio or its subtitles	YouTube Downloader Pro
The Shorts a channel has already published	YouTube Shorts Scraper

❓ 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.