Publishing to YouTube

A YouTube post is one video. The post title becomes the video title, the body becomes the description, and tags go into YouTube's native tag field.

Limits

Per-video settings

• Privacy: public (default), unlisted, or private
• Category
• Made for kids declaration
• Notify subscribers: on by default
• Shorts mode: appends #Shorts to the title; the actual classification is YouTube's own, from duration (up to 3 minutes) plus a square or vertical aspect ratio. There is no API switch: that is YouTube's rule

Thumbnails

Attach an image (or set one per post) and it becomes the video's custom thumbnail after upload. YouTube's conditions apply and come back as a warning rather than failing the post: JPEG or PNG, under YouTube's 2 MB thumbnail limit, and the channel must be verified in YouTube Studio.

Playlists

The composer carries a playlist picker for each YouTube destination. A published video joins the playlist picked for that post; Make Default stores one on the connection, and every later post starts there. Failing to join a playlist never fails the upload, it comes back as a warning on the already-live video.

# Playlists on the channel, with the stored default marked
curl https://api.fopost.com/v1/accounts/{account_id}/youtube/playlists \
  -H "X-API-Key: $FOPOST_API_KEY"

# Create one
curl -X POST https://api.fopost.com/v1/accounts/{account_id}/youtube/playlists \
  -H "X-API-Key: $FOPOST_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"title": "Tutorials", "privacy": "public"}'

# Set the default, or null to clear it
curl -X PUT https://api.fopost.com/v1/accounts/{account_id}/youtube/playlists/default \
  -H "X-API-Key: $FOPOST_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"playlist_id": "PLxxxxxxxx"}'

Pass a playlist id as the playlist_id platform setting to override the default for one post.

Captions and transcripts

Once a video is live, its post page lists the caption tracks on it and reads any of them back as a transcript. Uploading a track takes the subtitle file itself: YouTube accepts SRT and WebVTT and works out which from the bytes, so the format is not declared.

# Tracks on a video
curl https://api.fopost.com/v1/accounts/{account_id}/youtube/videos/{video_id}/captions \
  -H "X-API-Key: $FOPOST_API_KEY"

# Upload a track
curl -X POST https://api.fopost.com/v1/accounts/{account_id}/youtube/videos/{video_id}/captions \
  -H "X-API-Key: $FOPOST_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"language": "en", "name": "English", "body": "1\n00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:04,000\nHello\n"}'

# Read one back
curl https://api.fopost.com/v1/accounts/{account_id}/youtube/captions/{caption_id} \
  -H "X-API-Key: $FOPOST_API_KEY"

Deleting

Deleting the post in FoPost deletes the video from the channel. This cannot be undone.

Next