Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge
There’s a general sense of doom on the TikTok feeds these days, and no wonder: it looks like the video service may be banned in the US as of January 19th. TikTok creators are offering satirical goodbyes to their Chinese spies and wondering how quickly they can download the several hundred — or thousand — videos they have up on the service.
TikTok itself apparently doesn’t like the idea of allowing its creators to bulk download their videos. You can download — in TXT or JSON format — a certain amount of your data, which, according to the support page, “may include but is not limited to your username, watch video history, comment history, and privacy settings.” When I tried it, it did not include my videos.
You can also share individual videos — the same way you can any file — but if you’ve got a library of a couple of hundred or more TikTok videos, that’s going to be quite a job. In that case, it’s a lot better to have a bulk download strategy.
To find out how to do that, I went into TikTok and waded through a group of videos offering different methods for downloading your content. I tried several of the methods and found three that worked relatively painlessly. (All,…
