How to Track Which YouTube Shorts You've Already Watched
YouTube Shorts doesn't mark videos as watched the way regular videos do. Here's how to add a progress bar to your feed so you stop rewatching the same clips by accident.
Watch a regular YouTube video partway through, come back to your feed later, and the thumbnail shows a red progress bar under it — a quiet, reliable signal that you’ve already seen this one. Shorts don’t get the same treatment. Scroll through a channel’s back-catalog of Shorts and every thumbnail looks equally unwatched, whether you saw it ten seconds ago or never.
Why this specifically trips people up on Shorts
A few things about the format make this worse than it would be for long-form video:
- Thumbnails are less distinct. A channel that posts a lot of Shorts often reuses similar framing, similar faces, similar text overlays — there’s less to visually anchor “I’ve seen this one” the way a unique long-form thumbnail usually gives you.
- Each one is forgettable individually. A 20-second clip doesn’t leave the same memory trace as a 10-minute video, so by the time you’ve scrolled past thirty of them, you genuinely can’t recall which ones you already opened.
- The scroll encourages speed over recall. Shorts are built for fast, low-friction swiping — the whole interaction is designed to not make you pause and think, which is exactly what remembering “have I seen this?” requires.
The result is a specific, recurring annoyance: binge a channel’s Shorts, run out of things you remember watching, come back a few days later, and end up re-clicking into several you’d already seen — sometimes more than once.
What actually fixes this
The fix needs to be passive — nothing works if it requires you to manually mark videos as watched while you’re mid-scroll. It also needs to show up on the thumbnail itself, in the feed, not buried in a separate history page you have to go check. And it needs to persist across sessions, so leaving and coming back to YouTube later doesn’t reset what it knows.
Doing it the same way YouTube does for regular videos
ShortsTrack adds a red progress bar directly onto every watched Shorts thumbnail in your normal feed — the same visual language YouTube already uses for long-form video, just applied to Shorts where it’s missing. Once a Short is fully watched, it also gets a “Viewed” badge, so a glance at any grid of thumbnails tells you immediately which ones you can skip.
The free tier covers the core of this: the progress bar and viewed badge on every thumbnail, a 7-day rolling watch history, basic today/this-week/total watch-time stats, and full light and dark mode support.
If you watch Shorts heavily enough that a 7-day window isn’t enough, the Pro upgrade removes that expiry entirely and adds a few things aimed at heavy users specifically: the option to hide watched Shorts from your feed outright instead of just marking them, a right-click to manually mark something watched or unwatched (useful for false positives, like a Short that autoplayed while you weren’t looking), a “jump to next unwatched Short” floating button, and per-channel watched counts — seeing “42/60 watched” on a channel tells you exactly how deep you are into its catalog without guessing.
A simple way to use it
If you regularly binge specific channels’ Shorts, the combination that helps most is the watched-progress bar plus, on Pro, hiding already-watched ones — at that point your feed effectively becomes “only what’s new,” which is the thing people actually want when they say they wish Shorts had a proper watch history.
