Posts on a channel's community tab

A feed of notes rather than a shelf of uploads

The community tab sits beside a channel's videos and works like a message board the channel writes on. Creators use it to announce an upload, ask an audience a question, show a photograph from a shoot, or say something that does not warrant a video.

Each entry is its own item with its own address, so the tab as a whole and one post on it are two different things. Pasting the tab address describes a feed and produces no rows, because a feed of many posts holds no single file.

Community posts are updates on a channel tab: text, images, polls, and sometimes attached video. Polls are page features without a media file. Image posts return image rows; posts that only link to a watch page need the watch URL instead.

Copy the address of the individual post while it is open. Channel home URLs do not identify one post.

Four kinds of post, four different answers

Look at the post itself before you decide what to do with it, because the type decides what exists behind it.

The tab mixes all four kinds together in one scrolling column.

• Text only: a written announcement with nothing attached, so there is no file of any kind.
• Image: one picture published beside the words, and a real file behind it.
• Poll: a question and a list of options, sometimes with a small image on each option.
• Video: either a short clip published in the post or a card linking to a full upload elsewhere.

A poll is a page feature, not a recording

The bars, the percentages and the vote count on a poll are drawn by the page from numbers held on YouTube's side. They change while people vote and they exist nowhere as a file.

That is why a poll address comes back with no media row unless the channel attached pictures to the options. Where images were attached, those images are ordinary picture files and behave like any other. A screenshot is the only way to keep the result of a poll, and even that captures one moment of a count still moving.

Telling a published clip from a link to an upload

Some posts contain a clip that plays inside the post itself. Others show a card with a title, a thumbnail and a runtime, which is a reference to a video that lives on the channel's videos tab.

Tap the card. If the player opens on a watch page and the address bar changes to a watch address, the media is that upload and the watch address is the one to paste. If the clip plays inside the post without leaving the feed, the post address is the right one.

Copying one YouTube community post address

Every post carries a share control, and it produces an address ending in a post identifier rather than a video identifier. That is the address that names one entry.

On a desktop, clicking the timestamp on a post opens it on its own page and puts the same address in the bar. Copying the address of the tab while scrolling past the post you wanted is the common mistake here, and it hands you the feed instead of the item.

Posts are small, and they come down easily

Community media is light. A photograph runs to a few hundred kilobytes and a clip attached to a post is usually short, so both sit well inside the 150 MB single-file limit that free use allows. Three finished files a day is the count to watch rather than the size.

Posts are also easy for a channel to delete, and channels delete them often once an announcement is stale. An address collected last month can point at nothing today, which is a removal rather than a fault. The creator owns what they posted, so keep a copy for yourself and ask before republishing it.

Keep this tab open until the browser finishes writing the file for youtube community post downloader. A prepared file only waits a short time before it expires from the temporary store.

Related pages

• Still images published with a video
• Short vertical uploads on a channel
• Saving a picture from a page
• Addresses that hold no video at all