[ad_1]
The disappointment of watching a great TikTok on your For You page just to accidentally reload everything and lose the clip forever is so common—so visceral—that the experience has become a bit of a meme. The incessant cries of us common folk must have reached the ears of those running the app, because they’ve rolled out several ways to check your watch history and find recently viewed videos.
Unlike the early days on the so-called clock app, there are now three good options for navigating your TikTok watch history, and the one you use will generally depend on how recently you watched a lost video.
How to undo a refreshed For You page (iOS only)
Accidentally refreshed your FYP? The fix is easy, as long as you have an iPhone: hit Undo at the top of the screen, directly under For You. You’ve got to be fast, though, as the small, easy-to-miss option will disappear within five seconds. Move too slowly and you’ll be stuck with whatever the algorithm has dredged up for you this time around.
This is the best way to go right back to the clip you last watched and recover very recently viewed TikToks, as tapping Undo will take you back to the previous bucket of videos, ordered exactly as they were.
Sorry, Android users, this feature hasn’t come to your phones yet.
How to find your TikTok watch history on iOS and Android
Although people with iPhones got the ability to see their TikTok history before Android users, the processes have since unified. As it should be.
On iOS, all you need to do is tap Profile in the bottom right, hit the main menu (three lines) in the top right, touch Settings and privacy, find Comment and watch history under the Content & Display heading, and select Watch history. If you never comment, you’ll only see Watch history after you open the settings and privacy menu.
On Android, the steps are similar: Profile > main menu (three lines) > Settings and privacy > Comment and watch history > Watch history. Again, if you never comment, you’ll only see Watch history after Settings and privacy.
No matter what mobile operating system you’re using, you’ll see every video you’ve watched within the past 180 days. If you’re trying to find something older, you’ll have to search for it with the normal TikTok search function (tips below).
You can find a recently watched video by scrolling down this page, but be warned: everything is on there. Whether it’s a video you watched in its entirety or one that happened to briefly load and autoplay as you moved around the app, it’s part of your TikTok watch history. The only videos you won’t find are Lives and Stories.
[Related: 7 tips to make the most of TikTok]
Unless you’re extremely patient, this method isn’t great for digging deep into your archive, because you can’t search the watch history page. If you’re a heavy TikTok user and watched something days or weeks ago, you’ll end up scrolling for a while. You can, however, hit Select in the top right and tap individual videos or touch Select all watch history in the bottom left. Then you can permanently get rid of those clips by tapping the bright red Delete button. At least tidy up a bit while you’re there.
How to search for recently viewed TikToks
If you struck out with the methods above, there’s one final technique that may help the most elusive lost TikToks. The catch: you’ll need to know enough about the video you watched to type something into the search bar. And if you can’t recall anything, well, you’re probably not missing much.
First, tap the search icon (a magnifying glass) in the top right corner of your screen. Then type out the relevant keywords and hit Search. Next, hit the Watched button just above the first row of videos. This will change your search results to show any videos you’ve watched. If you don’t see this option (along with All, Unwatched, and Recently uploaded), make sure you’re in the Top tab—they don’t appear if you’re in any of the others. Otherwise, TikTok may not have registered that you watched a video related to your search terms, or it may have passed before your eyes longer than 180 days ago.
As with your watch history, the Watched search filter will display TikToks that appeared in recent searches and auto-played as thumbnails as you looked through the results, so you may have to dig deeper every time you search.
Other TikTok search tips
The main search results page, whether you filter it or not, is stuffed with content. You can use these tabs and suggestions to further refine your search or just get lost in the TikTok abyss and hope your algorithm doesn’t take a devastating hit. I, for one, will probably spend the next week telling TikTok I’m not interested in those videos where people pour milk all over the counter while “making coffee” because I searched “coffee TikTok” while working on this story. (To do so, long-press on the video while it plays and hit Not interested on the menu that appears.
Across the top of the results page, you’ll see built-in filters that will display only top posts, users, videos, sounds, accounts that are currently live, and hashtags related to your search. Scroll down a little and you may also find suggestions for what other people searched for.
Within the less-obvious filters menu (two lines with circles on them) to the right of the search bar, there are also options to further focus your search on videos you’ve liked, dig up only those posted within a specific time frame, and sort by either relevant videos or ones with the most likes. This is also where TikTok gives you the option to provide feedback on any problems you may have had with their search function. When I first published this story back in January 2022, I joked that maybe if enough people used that form to re
quest an easy-to-use list of recently watched videos, TikTok would make it happen. Well, we did it, folks.
This story has been updated. It was originally published on January 4, 2022.
[ad_2]
Source link
Comments are closed.