If you've been using YouTube for a long time, you might remember a feature called Collections (sometimes known as Subscription Groups). It allowed you to take the hundreds of channels you follow and organize them into neat, manageable folders.
You could have a folder for gaming, one for tech news, and one for cooking. But in classic Google fashion, YouTube abruptly killed the feature, promising to "revamp" it. Years later, we're still waiting.
The frustration of the missing feature
If you search Reddit or Google Forums today, you will still find thousands of users complaining about this exact removal. Without the ability to group channels, the subscriptions page becomes a chaotic, unreadable mess.
"Collections for sure, I miss so many videos sometimes from people I'm subbed to since this feature was removed. Hate how they removed it along with saying they were going to revamp it... and in the end never did anything."
When you have 200+ subscriptions, checking your feed feels overwhelming. How do you separate the daily vlogs you want to watch right now from the multi-hour video essays you want to save for the weekend?
Why the algorithm isn't enough
YouTube's solution to this problem is to push you toward the Home page (the algorithm). They want you to rely on what they think you want to watch, rather than giving you tools to organize what you asked to watch.
"Now I have 200 Subscriptions but no way for it to show only my 20 favorite... They want people to use the 'What to Watch' page more I guess, but I don't necessarily want to filter through channels and recommended videos I didn't ask for. I just want to see updates from 20 existing channels quickly."
People have resorted to ridiculous workarounds, like creating entirely separate Google accounts just to keep their subscription numbers low. That shouldn't be necessary.
The fix: QueueTube's Tag Feature
I built QueueTube primarily to turn subscriptions into a continuous, hands-free playlist. But I quickly realized that people don't always want to watch everything in their feed at once.
That's why I added Tags. It brings back the exact functionality of YouTube Collections, but makes it even better by letting you auto-queue those specific groups.
With QueueTube, you can categorize your channels with tags like #gaming, #music, or #favorites. When you visit your subscriptions feed, you simply select a tag, and the extension instantly filters out everything else.
How to set up your channel groups
Because QueueTube is a lightweight Chrome extension, bringing back Collections takes less than two minutes. Here is how it works:
Capture your channels
Go to your YouTube Channels page and click the red Capture Subscriptions button. QueueTube will auto-scroll and save a list of all your channels locally to your browser.
Create your Tags
Open the QueueTube tag manager from your Chrome toolbar. Create custom groups (like #news or #top20) and assign your channels to them.
Filter and Watch
Go back to your subscriptions feed. Click the # button at the top of the page, pick your tag, and QueueTube will only queue up videos from those specific channels.
You don't need a second Google account, and you don't need to rely on the algorithm. You can finally take back control of your YouTube feed.