🧭Your Folders Also Live in YouTube's Own Sidebar, Not Just the FolderTube Panel

Two places, one folder structure

The overlay panel — opened by clicking the purple FolderTube button in YouTube's top bar — is the full management surface: syncing your subscriptions, dragging channels between folders, and running through every channel you follow. The native Guide section is a lighter, always-visible view of the same folder tree, rendered as its own "Folders" block inside YouTube's left sidebar, right alongside Subscriptions.

Both read from the same underlying folder data. Creating, renaming, or deleting a folder in one place shows up in the other immediately — there is no separate or duplicated folder list to keep in sync.

What the native Guide section can do

• Expand or collapse any folder, including nested subfolders, with a click on its row.
• Show an unread-count badge next to a folder's name, the same badge described in the new-upload feed guide — expanding a folder marks it (and any subfolders inside it) as seen.
• List the channels inside an expanded folder, each as a clickable row with its avatar and name — clicking navigates straight to that channel within YouTube's own page transitions, without a hard page reload.
• Create a new folder from a small + button in the section header.
• Edit or delete an existing folder from a per-folder ⋯ menu, which opens the same folder dialog used everywhere else in FolderTube — including the color and icon fields.

What still needs the full panel

The Guide section is a viewing and light-editing surface, not the place for bulk changes. Two things specifically live only in the overlay panel:

• Syncing your subscriptions for the first time, or pulling in newly subscribed channels in bulk.
• Dragging a channel from one folder into another. The Guide section shows channels, but it doesn't support drag-and-drop reordering the way the overlay panel does — see the drag-and-drop guide for that workflow, or the quick per-channel folder button covered in the companion article on adding a channel to a folder without opening the sidebar.

Where you'll actually see it

1. Install FolderTube from the Chrome Web Store and sync your subscriptions once from the overlay panel, the same as any first-time setup.
2. Open YouTube's left sidebar (the same one that lists Subscriptions and Trending) — a "Folders" section appears there automatically, listing whatever folders you've already created.
3. Click a folder's row to expand it and see the channels inside, or click the + in the section header to create a new one directly from there.

Expanding a folder clears its badge

Opening a folder in the Guide section marks that folder — and any subfolders nested inside it — as seen, the same way opening it in the overlay panel does. If you only want to check whether something is new without committing to "seen," the unread count itself is visible without expanding; expanding is what resets it.

Is any of this Premium?

Viewing the Guide section, expanding folders, and creating or renaming a folder from it are all free. The parts that are Premium are the same ones that are Premium everywhere in FolderTube — custom folder colors and icons, and subfolders themselves — since editing a folder from the Guide section opens the identical dialog used in the overlay panel.

Premium starts at $2.99/month, with $19/year and $39 lifetime options.

What to read next

For the mechanics behind the unread badges shown in both places, see the new-upload feed guide. For the general folder framework this sits on top of, see how to organize YouTube subscriptions.