What it is
Uplora is a publishing tool for YouTube channels that work with an outside editor. The editor uploads the finished video and fills in everything YouTube asks for — title, description, tags, thumbnail, category, visibility, publish time — and the owner reads it over and approves. Uplora then publishes to the channel on the owner's behalf. It is for creators who have handed editing to someone else and would rather not hand over the channel with it.
What it does
An editor signs in to the workspace and uploads the original master. The file goes to storage in parts rather than in one shot, so a transfer that drops at eighty percent picks up from the last completed part instead of starting a multi-gigabyte upload over. On the same screen the editor writes the metadata YouTube will want: title, description, tags, category, language, visibility, the made-for-kids declaration, a thumbnail, and a proposed publish time.
The owner gets told something is waiting — by email, and on Telegram if they have linked it. They open the package and either approve it or send it back with a reason the editor can act on. Approval is the only thing that unlocks publishing. An account carrying the editor role has no route to the publish action at all, whatever it tries in the interface.
Once approved, Uplora pushes the video to YouTube using the permission the owner granted, either immediately or at the scheduled time. Nobody re-uploads a 12 GB file to hand it over, and no master gets passed around a shared drive. If the owner wants Uplora's access gone, they remove it on their Google account page and it is gone — no password change, no working out afterwards who else had the login.
How it's built
Uplora is a Next.js app written in TypeScript, running on Vercel with PostgreSQL behind it. Publishing goes through the YouTube Data API v3. Masters are uploaded straight to object storage in parts rather than through the app server, which is what makes a file that size practical.
The decision the rest of it hangs off is that there is no channel credential anywhere in the system. The owner grants Uplora permission through Google's own consent screen, and that grant lives on the owner's Google account, revocable in a click. Everything downstream follows. The editor gets an Uplora account and a job to do; publishing is something the server does with the owner's grant, and the editor is never in that path. The editor also never opens YouTube Studio, so the channel's revenue and analytics stay where they were.
Where it is now
Uplora is live at www.uplora.io. It is the one thing I have released rather than am still building.
A second version is in progress alongside it. It adds review comments pinned to an exact moment in the video, so "fix this" arrives attached to the frame it is about. It verifies every master with a sha-256 checksum, so what publishes is provably the file that was uploaded, and it keeps an append-only record of who approved what and when. It raises the per-file ceiling to 256 GB.
Some of it is not built yet. Billing sits behind a flag and is switched off. WhatsApp notifications are declared but not implemented — email and Telegram are what work today. The in-browser review preview, which would let an owner watch a light rendition instead of the master itself, is still to come.