- A store listing tells you what an extension can do. It rarely tells you what happens when you want your notes out.
- Last update, export and import: three checks you can run in ten minutes, without installing anything else.
- A three-moment test on a real video, to compare two tools on what matters to you.
You are watching a cooking video. At the fifth ingredient, the presenter says something you want to find again in three weeks, and your hands are covered in flour. You search for “YouTube bookmark extension” in the Chrome Web Store and land on a dozen tools that all describe themselves the same way: fast, handy, powerful.
The problem is not finding an extension. There are more than you need. The problem is choosing one you will still use in six months, with notes inside it that you still want to read. I build ReplayGlows, so read what follows with that in mind. I am not giving you a ranking. I am giving you three checks and a ten-minute test. The facts come from public listings, checked on November 5, 2026. My own story of building it is in why I built ReplayGlows.
A listing tells you what the tool does, not whether it is alive
A Chrome Web Store page shows the version, the date of the last update, and the number of reviews. It takes thirty seconds to read, and it tells you more than the feature list, which the publisher wrote.
Smart Bookmarks for YouTube was updated on August 15, 2026, with a move to Manifest V3, the current extension format in Chrome. That is the sign of a tool someone still maintains. Bookmarker for YouTube has 42 reviews and version 2.0.0, dated January 3, 2025. It may still work, but its last update is almost two years old. Youtube Bookmarks has not changed since December 28, 2023, and has a single review. That does not prove it is broken, but nobody has touched it in almost three years.
A date guarantees nothing. It only tells you whether someone is still keeping up with YouTube’s changes. YouTube changes its player often, and it does not reload the page when the video changes: the extension has to detect the new player without a reload. That detection is usually the first thing to break. An unmaintained tool rarely dies all at once. It degrades: a shortcut stops responding, a button moves, and you discover it on the day you need it. Before adding one more extension to your browser, also read one extension per problem. Every installed tool is one more thing to maintain.
Export decides what is left of your notes
Your bookmarks are your only record of what you retained. So the useful question is not “does it export?” but “what comes out, in which format, and in how many steps?” The answers vary a lot.
Smart Bookmarks exports the bookmarks of one video at a time, as YAML or in a “simple” format, from the three-dot menu in the popup. Its listing also says that importing replaces the video’s existing bookmarks. Export before you import, or you lose what you already had. Few people read that line, and it matters the day you change machine or browser.
Bookmarker for YouTube advertises an export and shareable links that open the video at the noted moment. Those are useful for sharing a passage with someone. Still, check the output format: it decides whether you can read your notes without the extension.
ReClipped sees a wider scope. It also annotates Vimeo, Google Drive, Dropbox and other platforms, and it exports to Markdown or PDF. Its integrations page says, however, that exporting to Obsidian requires a Basic subscription, and that mass export is still “coming soon”. You can take your notes out one video at a time, not all at once. If you annotate a lot of videos, weigh that limit before you build a system on top of it.
ReplayGlows copies Markdown to the clipboard without creating a file. Each line is a link that opens the video at the noted second. It also offers a JSON backup, and in supported browsers, a folder you choose can receive a Notes.md file per video automatically, with the captures (in Brave, captures go through downloads). Without an account, your notes stay in the browser profile where you take them, with no automatic sync to the app; an optional account moves them to the cloud. You should know that before you rely on it: if you switch browsers without exporting, your notes stay where they were.
Count the steps, not the features
An idea arrives in the middle of a video. What matters is what you have to do between seeing it and having it noted. That is where tools separate, because each extra step is a chance not to do it at all. It is the same principle as capture now, sort later: capturing has to cost less than hesitating.
With Smart Bookmarks, adding a bookmark goes through the popup, opened from the browser toolbar, then the a key or the + button. Its listing also says the hotkeys work directly on the YouTube page, which changes a lot if you want to avoid the popup. With Bookmarker for YouTube, the listing describes an icon beside the volume control: one click in the player to mark the moment, and the note is added afterwards, in the list. With ReplayGlows, ALT+B marks the moment, the note stays optional, and the other shortcuts (ALT+D to delete, ALT+Q to add without a note, ALT+1 and ALT+2 to navigate) can be changed in the settings. Only one bookmark per second is allowed: a second one at the same moment is refused, and the message asks you to edit the existing one.
These differences look small on paper. They are not small when the video is fullscreen and your hands are busy. A popup is one more step, and it is often the step that makes you give up. The details matter too. In ReplayGlows, the help guide asks you to close the popup, click in the player, then use the shortcut: one more click, exactly when you want to avoid touching anything.
So test by counting, not by reading. How many steps between “I want to note this” and “it’s noted”? How many if the note stays empty? How many to find it again a week later? Those three numbers matter more than the feature list, because you repeat them on every video.
The ten-minute test
This test compares two tools on what matters to you, not on their feature lists. It needs nothing but a fifteen- to twenty-minute video you already know, and a stopwatch. The same principle applies to text expanders: you do not pick the tool with the most features, but the one that works on your real cases.
- Install the two candidates, then open the same video in the same browser.
- Add a bookmark with a note at three moments: fullscreen without the mouse, then with the mouse, then with an empty note. Count the steps each time.
- Export everything you just created and paste the result into your notes app. If the export takes three menus, write that down.
- Before testing the import, export your existing bookmarks. Then import that backup into another video, and check that you get everything back without losing anything else.
- Keep the tool that takes the fewest steps at each stage. If they are tied, keep the one that does not require an account to get your data out.
The test is short because the decision is short. After ten minutes you know what each tool asks of you, and you do not need a feature list to decide. If one of them has an export step you cannot do in one move, that already answers the question. Write your results down in the same place as your notes. The next time a tool promises something on its store page, you will have your own numbers to check it against.
What this article does not tell you
For this piece, I did not run a timed test on each of these tools. I describe what their listings publish, what I checked in ReplayGlows’ code and settings, and what the test shows you. Some tools have very few reviews (one for Youtube Bookmarks), so do not base your decision on the rating alone. A ten-minute test does not replace a week of real use, but it stops you from spending that week on the wrong tool.
What changes for you
Run the test on one video today, before you watch the next one. If you keep ReplayGlows, start with ALT+B and an empty note: it is the shortest gesture, and you can always enrich the bookmark later. For the general capture method, the lesson Capture & Collect in the course lays out the framework, and the ReplayGlows product page covers the settings and export formats. Once a week, open your bookmark list and click three of them: each one should land on the right second of the right video. A tool that fails that check on a few videos will fail it on a few hundred, and that is the moment to export and move on.
Sources
Listings checked on November 5, 2026. Versions and dates come from public store listings; ReplayGlows features come from its code and product page.
See the 5 sources for this article
- Smart Bookmarks for YouTube, publisher constnode, updated August 15, 2026: Chrome Web Store listing
- Bookmarker for YouTube, publisher YT Bookmarker, updated January 3, 2025: Chrome Web Store listing
- Youtube Bookmarks, publisher Mehul Gadhia, updated December 28, 2023: Chrome Web Store listing
- ReClipped, updated April 3, 2026: Chrome Web Store listing
- ReClipped, integrations page, consulted November 5, 2026: reclipped.com/connect_export