Chrome extension · free On the Chrome Web Store

CommentGrab

The best part of a video is often underneath it. CommentGrab lets you point at comments on YouTube, click the ones you want, and turn them into clean images and short animated clips. They are redrawn from the text rather than screenshotted, so they stay sharp at any size, on any background, in any format.

Add to Chrome Free · no account · Chrome on a computer
Support CommentGrab on Ko-fi

Grabbing

Point at it and click.

Open a video, click the CommentGrab icon (or press Alt/Option+Shift+C) and a small panel appears. Hover a comment and it gets an outline; click and it is cut out and flies into the panel. Click it again to drop it. Replies work too.

What is kept is the comment itself: the name, the text, the likes, how long ago, the profile picture, and which video it came from. Not a picture of it.

Hover, click, grabbed. The panel keeps the list.

Straight to PNG

You do not have to open the canvas at all. Export PNGs in the panel saves every picked comment as its own transparent image.
Clicks stay with CommentGrab

While the picker is on, clicking a comment grabs it and nothing else. No likes, no links, no accidental replies.

Canvas

Put them where you want them.

The canvas is where comments become a picture. Add them one at a time or all at once, drag them into place, resize, rotate, switch between dark and light. Every comment has a number, 01, 02, 03, and the same number follows it everywhere: in the list, on the timeline and in the file names.

The CommentGrab canvas editor. Picked comments listed on the left with Add, PNG and Remove buttons, a 16:9 canvas in the middle with six comments scattered at slight angles, and editing tips on the right. Along the top: Still and Animation, the canvas size, background choices, and Stack, Grid and Scatter. — Scatter: a slight tilt each, and as little overlap as it can find.

Stack, Grid, Scatter

One neat column, rows as large as they fit, or a loose pile. It works on the comments you have selected, or on all of them.
Any size

1920×1080 for YouTube, 1080×1920 for Shorts, TikTok and Reels, square, or 4:5.
Backgrounds

Dark, light, a colour of your own, your own image, or green screen for keying out in a video editor. Or none at all: still images export with a transparent background.

Animation

Animate the comments.

Switch to Animation and the same layout gets a timeline. Each comment pops, fades, slides or drops into the place you gave it, and its likes count up from zero. The timing follows reading time: a short comment gets less time than a long one, never more than two seconds before the next arrives, and the video ends two seconds after the last one lands.

CommentGrab in Animation mode. The canvas shows three comments, one selected and rotated. The right-hand panel sets its style and animation, with Fade chosen and Typewriter text and Count up likes ticked. Along the bottom a timeline with one row per comment and a red playhead at two seconds. — One row per comment, front to back. Drag a bar to move it in time..

Build up, or one at a time

Let comments pile up into a thread, or have each one fade out as the next arrives.
Typewriter, if you want it

Off by default. Turn it on and the text types itself out.
Exports as MP4

Recorded in real time, so an eight-second video takes eight seconds.

Exporting

One file, or one per comment.

Export the canvas as a PNG or a video. Or export every picked comment as its own transparent PNG, into a folder you choose once, or as one ZIP.

A note in every folder

Each batch comes with _info.txt: the video's title, channel and link, and for every image the author, the likes, the text and a direct link back to that exact comment. For when you find the folder again in six months.
Credit where it's due

The comments belong to the people who wrote them. The info file makes it easy to say who.

What is kept

Everything stays on your computer.

No servers

CommentGrab has no backend. There is nothing to send anything to.
No accounts, no tracking

No sign-up, no analytics, no ads.
Stored in your browser

Picked comments and your canvas are saved in the browser, on your machine, so they are still there tomorrow. Uninstall it and they are gone.

What does go over the internet: the profile pictures, fetched from YouTube's own image servers, and the Roboto font, loaded from Google Fonts. The full version is in the privacy policy.

Under the hood

A Chrome extension and a canvas.

A content script on YouTube reads the comment you click, and only that one. Comments are drawn again from their text with the 2D canvas in the same typeface YouTube uses, which is why they scale cleanly and why the likes can count and the text can type. Video is the canvas recorded with MediaRecorder. Batch PNGs are drawn in an offscreen document and written to a folder with the File System Access API, or packed into a ZIP.

Try it

Version 1.0, free.

Where it works

Works in Chrome on a computer. Not on phones, and not on YouTube's mobile site.

If it saves you time: support CommentGrab on Ko-fi.

Add to Chrome Support CommentGrab All apps

Point at it and click.

Put them where you want them.

Animate the comments.

One file, or one per comment.

Everything stays on your computer.

A Chrome extension and a canvas.

Built with

Version 1.0, free.

Where it works