I have a very bad habit of accidentally touching my phone’s screen, which often causes me to go back or forth a page in the book I’m reading, or exit the YouTube video I’m watching, or go to a different TikTok video than I was just having fun. Also, if I need to make a phone call or reply to a Slack message, I may lose track of where I am.
Usually this is an easy fix: I can go back to the previous page of the book or browse through my YouTube history. Unfortunately, this is not so easy with TikTok, which does not have a simple way to check the history of the videos you watched.
For example, the day I started writing this, I accidentally scrolled through videos I watched at least twice and couldn’t get back to them right away. And because I couldn’t remember the name of the creator, I actually sank.
What should we do?
If I was quick enough to “like” the video or follow the creator, this would be easy:
- Tap the “Me” icon in the lower right corner.
- If you “like” the video, tap the heart icon at the bottom of your profile to see thumbnails of all the videos you’ve liked.
- If you follow the creator, tap the “Following” link just below your username to see a list of all the creators you follow. Then tap that person to see thumbnails of all their videos.
However, if you don’t like the video yet or don’t follow that creator – something that happens to me often – then the best way to find your watch history is to download it.
- Go to your profile page (tapping the “Me” icon in the bottom right) and tap the three lines in the upper right corner.
- Select “Privacy” > “Personalization and data” > “Download your data”
- Under the “Request data” tab, choose whether you want to download your data as a TXT file or JSON file and tap “Processing request”.
And wait. Unfortunately, this is not a quick process; It may take at least 24 hours or longer for your data to become available. Until then, if you go to the “Download data” tab, you’ll see a grayed out “Pending” button.
It took about three days before I saw the red “Download” button appear under the “Download data” tab. It took me to the web version of TikTok, where I had to log in again and was finally able to download a compressed file of my data. When I opened the file, I went to the Activity folder, where I found text files labeled “Video Browsing” as well as text files like Favorite Effects, Favorite Sounds, and so on. I finally found a list of the dates and URLs of the videos I was looking at there.
Once your data is ready, you can download it for up to four days. When you finally get it, of course, you may have completely forgotten which video you want to go back to or why. However, it doesn’t hurt to keep track of all the videos you’ve viewed – and you might be surprised at how many.
