tl;dr: YouTube is getting rid of annotations. If you have any in your videos, I made a tool that converts them into subtitles instead.
On January 15, YouTube is getting rid of annotations. (Not those info icons or end cards, but those boxes you could place anywhere on screen and put any kind of text into.) As of 2017 you can no longer add new annotations to your videos, and in less than two weeks, they'll be deleting existing annotations as well. If you still have old videos that make heavy use of them (for commentary or corrections), that's really unfortunate.
There's at least one way to preserve your annotations: with this online tool I made, you can convert annotations to subtitles. Enter a video URL and you'll get subtitles in the form of an .srt file, which you can upload on YouTube. That way, they'll sorta kinda live on.
There's still manual labor involved (uploading the .srt file on YouTube), and it's not exactly what subtitles are for, but I figure it's better than nothing.
I know there's probably not a lot of people that would benefit from this anymore, but it can't hurt to get the word out just in case. If this is something you care about, give this tool a try and let me know if it worked or didn't!
Here's the source code, by the way.
On January 15, YouTube is getting rid of annotations. (Not those info icons or end cards, but those boxes you could place anywhere on screen and put any kind of text into.) As of 2017 you can no longer add new annotations to your videos, and in less than two weeks, they'll be deleting existing annotations as well. If you still have old videos that make heavy use of them (for commentary or corrections), that's really unfortunate.
There's at least one way to preserve your annotations: with this online tool I made, you can convert annotations to subtitles. Enter a video URL and you'll get subtitles in the form of an .srt file, which you can upload on YouTube. That way, they'll sorta kinda live on.
There's still manual labor involved (uploading the .srt file on YouTube), and it's not exactly what subtitles are for, but I figure it's better than nothing.
I know there's probably not a lot of people that would benefit from this anymore, but it can't hurt to get the word out just in case. If this is something you care about, give this tool a try and let me know if it worked or didn't!
Here's the source code, by the way.