TikTok shows how to find lost history of videos users have watched
With clever use of the search function, videos that disappeared into the feed can be recovered again
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.A TikTok users has shared a genius way of finding videos that have been eaten up by the app.
TikTok posts have a tendency to get lost: the app regularly refreshes itself, for one, meaning that a good post can simply disappear from the feed before users have watched or shared it. What’s more, scrolling through the app is so quick that finding a video after the fact can be somewhere between difficult and impossible.
Despite those issues, there is no obvious place to find your watch history, for scrolling back through those posts. Numerous reports suggest a roundabout way – involving requesting personal data from the app, and then looking through that – but that takes time and needs re-doing every time.
Now, however, a TikTok users has shared a very easy way of finding a video from the history, even if it is long gone. And all it requires is clever use of the app’s search feature.
User rachforaday, who posts TikTok tips, published a video detailing an easy way to get around that issue. Captioned “here’s how to find that TikTok that you accidentally refreshed”, it shows that videos can be found with one quick search.
All you need to do is head to the discover page, which can be found by clicking on the menu buttons at the bottom of the app. Once that is done, type an asterisk – the * character – then press to search, click the filter and toggle the “watched video” option.
The asterisk means that it will find anything. And so all of the videos shown on the results page are simply all of the videos you have watched within the last seven days, including any that you have lost and want to find again.
The more complicated way of getting hold of the watch history means requesting your personal data from TikTok itself. That is done by opening up the app, heading to your profile, clicking through to the “privacy” option, pressing “personalization and data” and then pressing the “download your data” option.
You can choose how that is sent to you and then submit the request, which will require TikTok to approve it, which can take about a day. Once that is done, you can download the file – but will have to scour through to find the browsing history, and will only have a list of links to various videos, making picking through them difficult.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments