🎬 Automated YouTube video scheduling & AI metadata generation 🎬
⚡ 38,781 views · 🎬 Content Creation & Video
💡 Pro Tip — YouTube’s API quotas can be a bottleneck when you’re pulling data at scale. ScraperNode is a community node with dedicated scrapers for channels, videos, and comments — no quota limits, just structured data.
Description
👥 Who Is This For?
Content creators, marketing teams, and channel managers who need to streamline video publishing with optimized metadata and scheduled releases across multiple videos.
🛠 What Problem Does This Solve?
Manual YouTube video publishing is time-consuming and often results in inconsistent descriptions, tags, and scheduling. This workflow fully automates:
- Extracting video transcripts via Apify for metadata generation
- Creating SEO-optimized descriptions and tags for each video
- Setting videos to private during initial upload (critical for scheduling)
- Implementing scheduled publishing at strategic times
- Maintaining consistent branding and formatting across all content
🔄 Node-by-Node Breakdown
| Step | Node Purpose |
|---|---|
| 1 | Every Day (Scheduler) |
| 2 | Get Videos to Harmonize |
| 3 | Get Video IDs (Unpublished) |
| 4 | Loop over Video IDs |
| 5 | Get Video Data |
| 6 | Loop over Videos with Parameter IS |
| 7 | Set Videos to Private |
| 8 | Apify: Get Transcript |
| 9 | Fetch Latest Videos |
| 10 | Loop Over Items |
| 11 | Generate Description, Tags, etc. |
| 12 | AP Clean ID |
| 13 | Retrieve Generated Data |
| 14 | Adjust Transcript Format |
| 15 | Update Video’s Metadata |
⚙️ Pre-conditions / Requirements
- n8n with YouTube API credentials configured
- Apify account with API access for transcript extraction
- YouTube channel with upload permissions
- Master templates for description formatting
- Videos must be initially set to private for scheduling to work
⚙️ Setup Instructions
- Import this workflow into your n8n instance.
- Configure YouTube API credentials with proper channel access.
- Set up Apify integration with appropriate actor for transcript extraction.
- Define scheduling parameters in the Every Day node.
- Configure description templates with placeholders for dynamic content.
- Set default tags and customize tag generation rules.
- Test with a single video before batch processing.
🎨 How to Customize
- Adjust prompt templates for description generation to match your brand voice.
- Modify tag selection algorithms based on your channel’s SEO strategy.
- Create multiple publishing schedules for different content categories.
- Integrate with analytics tools to optimize publishing times.
- Add notification nodes to alert when videos are successfully scheduled.
⚠️ Important Notes
- Videos MUST be uploaded as private initially - the Publish At logic only works for private videos that haven’t been published before.
- Publishing schedules require videos to remain private until their scheduled time.
- Transcript quality affects metadata generation results.
- Consider YouTube API quotas when scheduling large batches of videos.
🔐 Security and Privacy
- API credentials are stored securely within n8n.
- Transcripts are processed temporarily and not stored permanently.
- Webhook URLs should be protected to prevent unauthorized triggering.
- Access to the workflow should be limited to authorized team members only.
🔗 Nodes Used
HTTP Request, YouTube, Schedule Trigger, AI Agent, OpenAI, Google Gemini Chat Model
📥 Import
Download workflow.json and import into n8n:
Workflow menu → Import from File