8 Cool Youtube Tools to Boost Your Creativity

Admit it, you spend well over the healthy amount of time on YouTube. We all do. With so much content, from amateur videos to professional films, being uploaded every day, it is an irresistible distraction and a bit of a productivity hazard… as well as a huge creativity booster!

Youtube is a fantastic platform with a lot to offer. These eight cool YouTube tools will help you get the most of it while being more inspired and productive.

1. Get Inspired with Playtube (Google Chrome)

Create a music or music video playlist with this crazy simple tool: queue up songs while you browse YouTube and then play them from the extension button without actually having to watch the videos. You can save playlists and easily control playback.

Listen Video for Google Chrome is another similar extension that lets you listen to Youtube videos without interrupting your work flow. Here are more tools and tips to play with Youtube playlists.

2. Download Free Content to Use: GenYoutube

Want to download the actual video? No problem! This is the premier YouTube video downloader that is both simple to use, and reliable. It has both a basic and pro version (I only tried the free one)

Tip: Did you know you can search Youtube for Creative Commons videos? I usually do that to find something awesome to use in my mash-ups (That’s where I use Youtube downloader!) Don’t forget to always credit the original videos and authors!

4. Eliminate Distractions: Turn Off The Lights (Google Chrome)

Do you like to watch things in a smaller window, but with there wasn’t so much distracting light? Then dim your screen using this plugin. It fades out everything but the video, so you can get the movie theater experience from your computer. Being someone who likes running other programs on the side that I monitor (such as video editing software I need to see complete), this is an awesome tool.

5. Create Animated Gifs: Giphy

Ever wonder how people make those great GIF images they share on Reddit and other sites? This is probably how they do it. Giphy is a really easy to use GIF creation extension for Chrome. You just select the portion you want to turn into the GIF, save it, and go. Each GIF can be up to 15 seconds long. If you have been on Tumblr and seen the long line of short GIFs that make up a story? This is definitely what they are using to create them.

Tip: Here are more tools to create and market animated GIFs:

1. Visual Content Marketing: How to Find Cool Cinemagraphs
2. GIFs Are the New Black… Are You in the Game???
3. 13 Tools to Create AWESOME Visual Content to Enhance Your Marketing (While Saving Time)

6. Save Time: SmartVideo

A slow buffer option (now that YouTube no longer has one), auto loop and more, this is an enhancement tool for YouTube that bypasses a lot of the updates that have made the platform less than intuitive in recent years. Available for Chrome.

7. Monitor Trends: YouTube Trends

What is trending right now on YouTube? What has been trending in the past year? What is slowly climbing the ladder of popularity, and how might that impact your own videos? All of these are important questions, and all of them can be answered using the official trending page provided by YouTube.

You can view by category, what is popular on the web, and recent entries. See what is becoming well know right now on their featured videos list on the front page. This is the perfect way of finding out what has been going on lately on the most popular video site on the web.

8. Set a Youtube Alarm Clock: AlarmTube

I am actually using this alarm clock not to forget to watch a video during my lunch time. If I come across a long video in the morning, I just drop it here to make sure my workflow will be interrupted with this video playing right when it’s time to take a break:

Do you have any tools for making YouTube even better? Maybe some hacks for the site itself? We’d love to hear about them, so let us know in the comments!