Organizing Very Large YouTube Playlists

There's a difference between 20-video weekend mixes and multi-thousand-video reference libraries. The latter needs a plan.

Split by chunk. Download in blocks of 100–200 items and store each block in its own subfolder. Filesystem tools slow down noticeably at ten thousand files per directory.

Use consistent naming. A prefix like NN_channel_title.mp4 sorts naturally and survives moves between drives.

Keep the source URL in a sidecar .txt file per folder — future you will want to know where those files came from.

Consider a plain SQLite index if the library grows past a few thousand items. Even a 20-line script beats manual search.