🎯How to Filter Your YouTube Subscription Feed by Folder

What YouTube does (and does not) offer

On youtube.com/feed/subscriptions, YouTube offers a small number of native filters:

• All / Videos / Shorts / Live / Posts — split by content type.
• Grid vs list view toggle.

There is no folder, category, or group filter. Every subscription contributes to the same chronological list, and the only way to surface only one topic is to scroll past everything else.

How FolderTube's folder filter works

FolderTube adds a folder filter directly to the Subscriptions page. When you select a folder, it visually hides YouTube's native list and places a separate feed built from the selected channels' RSS data on top. Clearing the folder selection removes that overlay and reveals YouTube's original list again.

• The filtered feed appears on the Subscriptions page, but its cards come from FolderTube's RSS cache rather than YouTube's native list.
• YouTube's Videos / Shorts / Live tabs cannot be combined with an active folder selection, because their native results are hidden while FolderTube's feed is displayed.
• Clear the folder selection and YouTube's regular all-subscriptions feed and content tabs come back unchanged.

Setting it up

1. Install FolderTube from the Chrome Web Store.
2. Open YouTube and click the purple FolderTube button in the top-right to open the sidebar.
3. Press the sync subscriptions button to import every channel you follow.
4. Create folders for the categories you actually watch — Tech, Music, News, Cooking, anything.
5. Drag channels from the sidebar into the matching folders.
6. Navigate to youtube.com/feed/subscriptions. The folder filter appears at the top of the feed.
7. Click any folder to filter the feed to only that folder's uploads.

How to design folders for a useful filter

The folder filter is only as good as your folder structure. Three patterns work in practice:

By topic

Tech, News, Cooking, Music. The most intuitive split. Best when your interests cleanly separate by subject.

By time available

Quick (channels with short uploads), Mid, Long. Best when you want to match what is in front of you to the time you actually have right now.

By moment of day

Morning Briefing, Lunch Break, Evening Wind-Down. Best when your watching habits split by time of day rather than topic.

Common questions about filtering

Does it actually hide channels from the global feed?

No. Selecting a folder only hides YouTube's native list visually and displays FolderTube's RSS-based list above it. It does not unsubscribe from channels or alter YouTube's data. Clear the selection and the native feed becomes visible again.

Can a channel be in multiple folders?

No. A channel belongs to one folder at a time. If it covers two topics, filter by whichever folder matters more in the moment, or create a combined folder for channels that genuinely span both.

Does the filter work for YouTube Shorts?

The active folder feed cannot be combined with YouTube's native Shorts tab. FolderTube instead has its own free Shorts-exclusion setting for the RSS-based feed; Shorts are excluded by default, and you can turn the setting off to include them. The checkbox lives in a folder's New tab in the FolderTube sidebar, and the same setting also applies to the folder feed on the Subscriptions page. Clear the folder selection when you want to use YouTube's native Shorts-only view.

What to read next

For the broader organization workflow, see the complete guide to organizing YouTube subscriptions. For grouping ideas, see how to group YouTube channels by topic.