If you add chapters to YouTube Videos, you’re at a huge advantage. And if you’ve ever wonders how to add chapters to YouTube videos, you’re in luck.

Adding chapters to YouTube videos enable viewers to easily navigate through different parts of a video, which is especially handy for longer content. It’s a nice feature for viewers who are looking for quick solutions to their problems, but can be a cumbersome task for the creators.

Nonetheless, if you’re a video creator, it is definitely something to consider. In addition to providing your audience with a pleasant viewing experience, adding chapters to YouTube videos come with added SEO benefits as well.

So in this post, we’ll not only walk you through how to add chapters to YouTube videos, but how to easily compile these chapters using Timebolt.io.

How to Add Chapters to YouTube Videos: Manual and Automatic Methods

The Manual Method

Navigate to your Channel Dashboard inside the YouTube Creator Studio.

Click on Content.

YouTube dashboard with arrow pointing to the "Content' menu item

Select the video you wish to add chapters to by clicking the pencil icon to edit.

Arrow pointing to the pencil icon inside the YouTube content list for editing a video.

In the description box, type “00:00” followed by the title of your first chapter.

Add subsequent timestamps and chapter names in sequence. Here’s an example:
00:00 Introduction
02:15 Chapter 2: Getting Started
05:30 Chapter 3: Advanced Tips

Example of how to create chapters in YouTube video

Once you’ve added all chapters, click Save. The chapters should appear immediately, but can take up to 24 hours to show up. If you don’t see your chapters within 24 hours, there may be an issue with your timestamps.

Automatic Method

YouTube also offers an automatic chapter creation feature, which uses AI to identify key moments in your video. To use this:

Navigate back to your Channel Dashboard.

Click on Content and select the video to edit.

Click Show More.

Arrow pointing to the show more button to navigate to automatic video chapters in YouTube.

Scroll down to “Allow automatic chapters and key moments,” and enable this option.

Automatically add chapters to YouTube videos.

While this feature can be handy, it’s less precise than manual chapter creation. Thus, using TimeBolt to pinpoint precise markers in your video and manually adding these as chapters is the recommended method for the highest accuracy and user-friendly experience.

Here’s how we do that with Timebolt.

Leveraging TimeBolt’s Markers for YouTube Chapters

The automatic YouTube chapters aren’t always reliable, and manually locating and adding chapters to YouTube videos is a time-consuming process. Luckily, the extremely simple but powerful video editing software, Timebolt.io, can shave tons of time off this process.

Timebolt.io is a program designed to take the mundane tasks of video editing off your hands, like removing silence from your video, adding video transitions, and even incorporating zoom punch effects to you videos, so you can focus on your content. If you want to learn more about this software, check out our in-depth review of Timebolt.

Creating Markers in TimeBolt

Timebolt’s markers feature is designed to seamlessly integrate with the YouTube chapters feature, making it straightforward to locate and add chapters to your YouTube videos.

Here’s how it works:

With TimeBolt, setting markers is as simple as navigating to the part of the video you wish to mark and right-clicking on the clip to select “Mark,” or you can just press ‘M’ on your keyboard.

Right click and select "Mark Clip" or Press the 'M' key on your keyboard to mark the clip.

To create a chapter for your YouTube video, right-click on the marked clip and label your marker with the appropriate chapter title.

Right click marked clip and enter the title of your chapter.

Exporting Markers as YouTube Chapters

Once you’ve placed and labeled your markers, scroll down and click on the three dots next to the rendering options.

Render options for exporting out your markers and labels for adding chapters to YouTube videos.

Select “Download Markers Text File,” which is pre-formatted for you to copy and paste directly into your YouTube video description, creating your YouTube chapters.

Export your markers and add chapters to YouTube videos

After exporting your markers from Timebolt, follow the steps listed above to manually add chapters to your YouTube video.

Conclusion

This simple markers feature inside Timebolt is a potent tool that makes the process of adding chapters to YouTube videos so much easier. But Timebolt is packing a whole lot more than just easy YouTube chapters. Give Timebolt a try for free and see how much time you could be saving on video editing.

This blog post contains affiliate links for which we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. However, we only recommend tools we believe in and use ourselves.

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I am an entrepreneur and adventure enthusiast, looking to break free from the Nine-Five grind. I'll show you what has worked and is currently working for me, as well as what hasn't worked so well.

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