Why doesn't the date match the one YouTube shows?

YouTube shows the date in your time zone and often rounded off. Here you see the exact time in UTC: if the video went out near midnight, in your country it may have been the day before or the day after.

Is it the upload date or the publish date?

The publish date, which is what the official API returns. It almost always matches the upload date, unless the channel uploaded it as private or scheduled and made it public later.

Is it a replacement for YouTube DataViewer?

For the main job, yes: exact date and time in UTC and the thumbnail to search on other sites. YouTube DataViewer, Amnesty International's tool, is no longer online. One difference: here you get a single thumbnail, the largest one.

How many videos can I check for free?

Without an account, 5 per day. With a free account, 10 per day and up to 300 per month, no card. Each video is one extraction.

YouTube upload date checker: exact date and time

YouTube shows a video's date rounded off (“3 years ago”) or without the time. Paste the link of a public video and we give you the exact publish date and time, to the second and in UTC, as the official YouTube API stores it. We also show the thumbnail at the highest resolution, ready to search in Google Lens or TinEye and see whether the image was already around before.

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No account, no card · YouTube · Vimeo · Dailymotion · WordPress · OpenGraph · nearly 70 players

What it shows

The publish date and time to the second, in ISO format and in UTC (the trailing Z), for example 2024-11-07T16:07:20Z.
The largest thumbnail the video has, with a link to open it full size.
The title and description, to confirm it is the video you were looking for.
The exact duration, which helps tell the original from a cut-down copy.
Paste several links and get each one's date, to see which came out first.

Good to know

The date is the publish date, not always the upload date: if the channel uploaded the video as private and made it public days later, you see the day it went public. YouTube does not publish when or where a video was filmed, nor the original file with its camera data: only whoever shot it has that.

What it is for

Verify a video shared as new: if it was published years ago, it is not from today.
Find the first copy of a video uploaded by several channels by comparing each one's time.
Run the thumbnail through image search engines to find the original or other copies.
Cite a video with its exact date in an article, a paper or a report.

How to use it

Copy the video link (watch?v=, youtu.be and shorts all work).
Paste it in the box above and press Extract.
Read the date on the entry. To search the image, tap “Open full size” and copy the thumbnail's address.

Converting to your time zone and searching the thumbnail

The time comes in UTC, the world reference, so it does not depend on where you or the channel are. To get your local time, add or subtract your offset from UTC. Near midnight that can change the day: a video published at 02:00 UTC went out the previous evening across most of the Americas.

For a reverse image search, open the thumbnail full size, copy the image address and paste it into Google Lens, Bing Visual Search, TinEye or Yandex Images. If the same image shows up earlier on another site, the video may be a re-upload of an older one.

City	Offset from UTC	12:00 UTC is
Los Angeles	UTC−8 (UTC−7 in summer)	04:00 (05:00)
New York	UTC−5 (UTC−4 in summer)	07:00 (08:00)
London	UTC+0 (UTC+1 in summer)	12:00 (13:00)
New Delhi	UTC+5:30	17:30

Dates for a whole playlist?

With the Basic plan you paste a playlist or a channel and download a CSV with one row per video and each one's exact date in a column, ready to sort from oldest to newest.

See plans

Frequently asked questions

Why doesn't the date match the one YouTube shows?: YouTube shows the date in your time zone and often rounded off. Here you see the exact time in UTC: if the video went out near midnight, in your country it may have been the day before or the day after.
Is it the upload date or the publish date?: The publish date, which is what the official API returns. It almost always matches the upload date, unless the channel uploaded it as private or scheduled and made it public later.
Is it a replacement for YouTube DataViewer?: For the main job, yes: exact date and time in UTC and the thumbnail to search on other sites. YouTube DataViewer, Amnesty International's tool, is no longer online. One difference: here you get a single thumbnail, the largest one.
How many videos can I check for free?: Without an account, 5 per day. With a free account, 10 per day and up to 300 per month, no card. Each video is one extraction.