YouTube Shorts title limit: 100 characters, and a batch checker

A YouTube Short title can be at most 100 characters. That limit appears in YouTube's Android help for creating Shorts, in the upload step, next to the privacy choice and the made-for-kids setting. If you prepare a batch of Shorts, check every title against 100 before you open Studio, because a long title is a late surprise.

The 100-character figure is from Create YouTube Shorts - Android, and the 15-video batch from Upload YouTube Shorts, both read on 2026-10-02.

Where does the 100-character limit apply?

YouTube's Android page lists the upload details in one place: the title is limited to 100 characters maximum, privacy can be public, private or unlisted, and a made-for-kids designation is required. The computer upload page adds that you can upload up to 15 videos at once, each then needing its own title in the Edit draft step.

The pages do not say how YouTube counts emoji or combining characters, so a Python length check is a first filter, not a guarantee.

How do you check a batch of titles?

This script reads one title per line from a text file and prints any line over 100 characters. It runs as-is with Python 3 and needs no network access or API key.

import sys

LIMIT = 100


def main(path: str) -> int:
    bad = 0
    with open(path, encoding="utf-8") as f:
        for n, line in enumerate(f, 1):
            title = line.rstrip("\n")
            if not title.strip():
                continue
            if len(title) > LIMIT:
                bad += 1
                print(f"line {n}: {len(title)} chars, over by {len(title) - LIMIT}")
    print(f"{bad} title(s) over {LIMIT}")
    return 1 if bad else 0


if __name__ == "__main__":
    sys.exit(main(sys.argv[1] if len(sys.argv) > 1 else "titles.txt"))

What else should the batch check cover?

Titles are only one of the checks. A Short also has to be square or vertical and up to 3 minutes, so pair the title pass with a file pass.

Where does Sume help?

Sume does not write titles to a limit or upload to YouTube. For the file side, Video inspect probes a clip on media.sume.com so you can read its duration and dimensions before upload, and our Python preflight post shows the call. Combined with the title script above, a batch of 15 is checkable in a minute.

If you generate the title text with a model, ask for a character cap in the prompt but still run the script: models miscount characters.