YouTube Bread Crumbs by Polyorchid

YouTube Breadcrumbs helps you retrace how you got from one video to the next—not just what YouTube puts in Watch History, but the messy path: thumbnails you scrolled past, related videos you hovered over, clips you opened and abandoned, and Shorts you skimmed before hitting Home.

Retrace your rabbit holes, recover lost videos, and save clips before they disappear from your algorithm.

Main Actions
Crumb
Save the video you’re watching on YouTube watch pages or Shorts pages to a temporary stash.
This is useful when you’re not ready to add something to Watch Later, but you also do not want to lose the link.

Trail
Open a sidebar with your recent video trail.
Filter your trail by:
- All
- Watched
- Seen
- Shorts
- Stash

From the sidebar, you can open videos, copy links, or jump to a channel when a channel link is available.
Buttons appear in the YouTube header beside the logo. The toolbar popup offers the same controls, plus quick stats.

What Breadcrumbs Tracks

Breadcrumbs can track:
- Videos that appeared on screen, even if you never clicked them
- Interactions such as seen, hovered, clicked, partially watched, watched, skipped, and crumbed
- Context, including Home, Search, Shorts, related sidebar, subscriptions, channel pages, playlists, and watch pages
- Shorts viewed, skipped, or watched for a few seconds
- A short breadcrumb trail showing how you arrived at each video
- Channels encountered, even if you did not subscribe

Everything is stored locally in your browser. Nothing is sent to external servers.

Privacy and Control
You stay in control.
Breadcrumbs includes options to:
- Auto-delete crumbs after 1 hour, 24 hours, 7 days, or never
- Pause all tracking anytime
- Skip Shorts entirely
- Block channels by name
- Enable Research notes to add optional notes when you crumb a video (off by default)
- Export JSON to download your data anytime

Permissions
Breadcrumbs only runs on youtube.com.