Intro
Good day everyone! I found a way to bulk download TikTok videos for the impending ban in the United States. This is going to be a guide for those who want to archive either their own videos, or anyone who wants copies of the actual video files. This guide is for a Windows base device.
This guide is going to use 3 components:
- Your exported Tiktok data to get your video links
- YT-DLP to download the actual videos
- Notepad++ to edit your text files from your tiktok data
Prep and Installing Programs
Request your Tiktok data. They make take a few hours to compile it, but once available, download it.
Press the Windows key and type "Powershell" into the search bar. Open powershell. Copy and paste the below into it and press enter:
Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Scope CurrentUser
Now enter the below and press enter:
Invoke-RestMethod -Uri https://get.scoop.sh/ | Invoke-Expression
Press the Windows key and type CMD into the search bar. Open CMD(commad prompt) on your computer. Copy and paste the below into it and press enter:
scoop install yt-dlp
You will see the program begin to install. This may take some time. While that is installing, we're going to download and installNotepad++. Just download the most recent release and double click the downloaded .exe file to install. Follow the steps on screen and the program will install itself.
Downloading Videos
Link Extraction
Once you have your tiktok data, unzip the file and you will see all of your data. You're going to want to look in the Activity folder. There you will see .txt (text) files. For this guide we're going to download the "Favorite Videos" but this will work for any file as they're formatted the same.
Open Notepad++. On the top left, click "file" then "open" from the drop down menu. Find your tiktok folder, then the file you're wanting to download vidoes from.
We have to isolate the links, so we're going to remove anything not related to the links.
Press the Windows key and type "notepad", open Notepad. Not Notepad++ which is already open, plain normal notepad. (You can use Notepad++ for this, but to keep everything separated for those who don't use a computer often, we're going to use a separate program to keep everything clear.)
Paste what is below into Notepad.
https?://[^\s]+
Go back to Notepad++ and click "CTRL+F", a new menu will pop up. From the tabs at the top, select "Mark", then paste https?://[^\s]+ into the "find" box. At the bottom of the window you will see a "search mode" section. Click the bubble next to "regular expression", then select the "mark text" button. This will select all your links. Click the "copy marked text" button then the "close" button to close your window.
Go back to the "file" menu on the top left, then hit "new" to create a new document. Paste your links in the new document. Click "file" then "save as" and place the document in an easily accessible location. I named my document "download" for this guide. If you named it something else, use that name instead of "download".
Downloading Videos using .txt file
Go to your file manager and decide where you want your videos to be saved. I went to my "videos" file and made a folder called "TikTok" for this guide. You can place your items anywhere, but if you're not use to using a PC, I would recommend following the guide exactly.
Right click your folder (for us its "Tiktok") and select "copy as path" from the popup menu.
Paste this into your notepad, in the same window that we've been using. You should see something similar to:
"C:\Users[Your Computer Name]\Videos\TikTok"
Find your TikTok download.txt file we made in the last step, and copy and paste the path for that as well. It should look similar to:
"C:\Users[Your Computer Name]\Downloads\download.txt"
Copy and paste this into the same .txt file:
yt-dlp
We're now going to make a command prompt using all of the information in our Notepad.
yt-dlp -P "C:\Users[Your Computer Name]\Videos\TikTok" -a "C:\Users[Your Computer Name]\Downloads\download.txt"
yt-dlp tells the computer what program we're going to be using. -P tells the program where to download the files to. -a tells the program where to pull the links from.
Now paste your newly made command into Command Prompt and hit enter! All videos linked in the text file will download.
Done!
Congrats! The program should now be downloading all of the videos. Reminder that sometimes videos will fail, but this is much easier than going through and downloading them one by one.
If you run into any errors, a quick Google search should help, or comment here and I will try to help.
