Post to TikTok
Post from your browser
Send a video straight to your TikTok account without the app’s upload screen. Useful on iPhone, where TikTok’s own web upload hangs at the last step, and it takes files up to 500 MB. Your file is sent exactly as you choose it.
Only our test accounts can connect for the moment. To post a video today, upload it on tiktok.com — everything else here works as normal.
Connect your TikTok account
You will be sent to TikTok to approve it. We ask for one thing: permission to send a video to your TikTok inbox. We cannot read your videos, your followers or your messages.
Connect TikTokConnected as your account
This route costs you quality. We measured it.Why
A 1080p 60 fps file at 19.3 Mbps, prepared with the encoder on the home page, went through this route and came back from TikTok at 576p, 30 fps and 0.8 Mbps — half the frame rate and about four per cent of the bitrate. The same prepared file, uploaded on tiktok.com instead, stayed at 1080p.
The cause is the last step rather than anything on this page. TikTok puts the video in your inbox and you finish the post inside the TikTok app — and the app re-encodes it on publish. Nothing done before that survives it.
If quality is what you came for, use the encoder on the home page and upload the file on tiktok.com. That is the route we measured at 1080p. Use this page when that one is not open to you.
Posting directly is new here, and not yet measured.More
Posting through your inbox cost a lot of quality, because the post was finished in the TikTok app and the app re-encodes it. Posting directly skips the app. We have not yet measured what TikTok does to a file posted this way, and this page will say once we have.
This connection can only send videos to your inbox. Connect again and leave the posting permission switched on to choose your caption and audience here and post straight to your profile.
Drop a video here
or click to choose · MP4 or MOV · sent exactly as it is
Working…
Why this page uses a server
Everywhere else on this site, your video stays on your device. Here it does not, and it is worth being straight about why.
Your file is sent exactly as you chose it — this page does not rebuild or change it. But TikTok’s upload endpoint refuses requests made by a browser, so the file has to pass through our server on its way to them. We tested this rather than assumed it: a direct upload is blocked by TikTok’s own CORS policy.
Nothing is written to storage. The file is forwarded to TikTok as it arrives and is gone when the transfer ends. What is kept is the access TikTok grants us, so you do not have to reconnect every visit — described in full on the privacy page.
It is also why there is a 500 MB limit here and nowhere else on the site. The bytes sit on an open connection while they pass through, and the longer that takes the likelier it is to break — particularly on a phone moving between wifi and mobile data. If a part does fail it is sent again rather than starting the file over, but there is a size past which that stops being a fair thing to ask of anyone’s connection.
500 MB sits above the sizes at which the TikTok apps start compressing on the device — around 72 MB on Android and 288 MB on iPhone — so a large file is not refused here for being large. An earlier version of this page went on to say such a file arrives intact. It does not, and the measurement above is why that sentence is gone.
If you would rather nothing passed through us, upload the file on tiktok.com yourself. No server of ours is involved at any point, and there is no size limit here to worry about.
Where the video ends up
That depends on what your connection allows, and the page shows you which before anything is sent.
Posting directly, the video goes straight to your profile with the caption, audience and settings you chose on this page. Nothing is posted until you press Post to TikTok, and TikTok may take a few minutes to process it before it appears.
Through your inbox, it lands in your TikTok notifications, not under Drafts. Open the app and look at the Inbox tab: there will be a notification saying a video is ready to post. Tap it and the editor opens with your video loaded, ready for a caption, sound and the usual choices. This catches people out, because “upload to drafts” is how the feature is usually described — including by us until we watched where it actually landed.
Whatever file you send, the app opens it in its editor when you finish the post, and encodes what the editor exports. Anything done to the file before that is undone a step later.
Posting directly does not go through the editor. It needs a further permission from TikTok, which a connection either has or does not; where it has it, this page posts directly instead.
Read next
- The encoder — the route measured at 1080p: prepare the file here, then upload it on tiktok.com yourself.
- TikTok video quality checker — once it is posted, see what TikTok is actually serving. Worth running on anything sent from this page.
- TikTok export settings that actually matter — what to export before any of this.