How to bulk-import sources into NotebookLM & add folders (Gemini Notebook)

The fastest way to feel how much manual work NotebookLM asks of you is to try to add a YouTube playlist. Twenty videos, one course. Natively, that's twenty trips through the "Add source" box, one link at a time, waiting for each to process. I did it once. Once was enough.

NotebookLM — Gemini Notebook after the July 2026 rename — makes you add sources individually, and it has no folders at all. When you've got three notebooks that's fine. When you've got twenty, and each holds a dozen sources, the flat list stops being something you can navigate and starts being something you scroll past.

The manual way (the one-link-at-a-time grind)

For bulk adding, the honest native workflow is:

1. Open Add sources.
2. Paste one URL. Wait for it to fetch and process.
3. Repeat. For a playlist, open each video, copy its link, paste, wait — for every single one.

And for organization, there's no real workflow, because there are no folders. People cope by cramming related material into one giant notebook (bad — the AI gets less focused and you hit source limits) or by naming notebooks carefully and hoping they remember. Neither scales.

The RSS trick, and where it stops

One half-workaround worth knowing: YouTube gives every channel a hidden RSS feed, so if you can get the feed URL you can sometimes pull recent videos in bulk. It's clever, but it's fiddly, it only covers recent uploads, and it does nothing for the folders problem. It's a patch, not a fix.

The one-click way

Two features in NotebookBloom cover this — and they're the ones I reach for at the start of every new project.

Bulk import:

• Paste many URLs at once and add them all in a single pass.
• Drop in a whole YouTube playlist, channel, or search results — every video becomes a source, no video-by-video copying.
• Import an RSS feed to pull a batch of articles in together.

Folders & tags:

• Group notebooks into folders so a semester or a project is one place, not twenty loose notebooks.
• Tag sources so you can pull "all the interviews" or "everything from 2024" across the board.
• Pair it with cross-notebook search and the flat pile finally behaves like a library.

Does this change under Gemini Notebook?

No. The July 2026 rename to Gemini Notebook didn't add bulk import and didn't add folders — sources still go in one at a time, notebooks are still a flat list. So the same tools help whether your tab says NotebookLM or Gemini Notebook.

The setup phase of research shouldn't be the tedious part. Get your sources in fast, put them in folders, and spend the saved hour on the actual reading.

NotebookBloom is an independent extension and is not affiliated with Google. NotebookLM and Gemini Notebook are names for the same Google product; NotebookLM is a trademark of Google LLC.