Tella uploads your video to your YouTube channel from Share → Publish, with its title, description, privacy, chapters, and your transcript as a caption track. Pick YouTube for a regular video or YouTube Shorts for a Short.
Publish a video to YouTube
- Click Share and open the Publish tab.
- Under Destinations, pick YouTube (connect it first if it says Connect).
- Under Post details, click All destinations to show the platform tabs, then open the YouTube tab and check the Title, Description and Who can see it: Public, Unlisted or Private.
- Click Publish to YouTube.
When it’s done, the line under the steps reads Published to YouTube. Click View to open the video on YouTube.
Add chapters to the YouTube description
If your video has chapters, the YouTube tab shows Add chapters to the description, on by default. Tella adds the chapter list below your description, timed to the video it uploads, so YouTube shows them as chapters on the progress bar.
YouTube only shows chapters when there are at least 3, the first starts at 0:00, and each is at least 10 seconds long. If yours don’t fit that, the option is greyed out and says why. Edit them in the editor’s Chapters tab.
The option is only on the YouTube tab. YouTube Shorts doesn’t offer it.
Tella removes < and > from YouTube descriptions and cuts the text to YouTube’s 5,000-byte limit. Some characters use more than one byte, so descriptions in languages such as Chinese or Japanese can be cut well before 5,000 characters.
When adding chapters, Tella budgets space in characters, not bytes. A long description with multibyte characters can still have its chapter list cut off. Keep your description and chapter titles short, then check the published description on YouTube.
Upload your transcript as YouTube captions
Publish subtitles file under Export settings is on by default. YouTube gets your transcript as captions that viewers can turn on and off.
If the video has translated subtitles, Publish subtitles file becomes Subtitle tracks: choose Original and any of the translations, and YouTube gets a caption track for each, so viewers can pick their language. All of them are chosen until you change it.
If you turn on Burn subtitles into the video instead, Tella doesn’t upload a caption track, so viewers don’t get the subtitles twice.
If YouTube refuses the captions, the video is still published, and the status reads Published to YouTube with subtitles missing with YouTube’s reason.
Tag a channel in the description
On the YouTube tab, type @ and the start of a channel’s handle in the Description, then pick the channel from the list.
Publish a YouTube Short
Pick YouTube Shorts under Destinations. The video has to be vertical or square and at most 3 minutes long. Otherwise YouTube Shorts is greyed out and says Unavailable: landscape video or Unavailable: longer than 3 mins when you hover it. If it’s landscape, change the video’s format in the editor first.
YouTube decides what counts as a Short from the video’s shape and length, so the same rules apply whichever you pick. YouTube Shorts just stops Tella from uploading a video that wouldn’t become one.
Why is my YouTube video limited to 15 minutes?
YouTube lets channels that aren’t verified upload videos up to 15 minutes long. Tella reads your channel’s limit, and for a longer video greys out YouTube with Unavailable: longer than 15 mins. Verify your channel in YouTube Studio to upload longer videos, then publish again.
Tella’s access to your YouTube account has expired
Google sometimes stops renewing Tella’s access. When that happens, YouTube asks you to Connect again in the Publish tab, and its card in Settings → Connections says Tella’s access to your YouTube account has expired and Google won’t renew it. To fix it:
- Go to myaccount.google.com/permissions and remove Tella.
- Reconnect YouTube in Tella under Settings → Connections, or from Destinations in the Publish tab.
Last modified on September 30, 2026
