How to Import a TikTok Collection

A collection is a named folder of saved videos that lives on your own profile. Most DJs end up with a few: one for edits worth chasing, one for a genre they are digging into, one for the sets they want to sit down with properly. It is the closest thing TikTok has to a crate.

Each collection has its own share link, and each one is separately public or private. That distinction is the one that matters here. A public collection is a page anyone holding the link can open, which is exactly what lets you hand the list to something outside the app. A private collection stays inside TikTok, and no link, tool, or account will get it out.

TikTok lets you set a collection public at the moment you create it, and lets you change that afterwards from the collection's own edit control. That setting belongs to the one collection, so making a single crate public leaves the rest of them exactly as they were.

It is worth knowing what public actually means before you flip it: anyone holding the link can see the list of videos you saved into it. If that is more than you want standing permanently, flip it back afterwards. The link is read once, at the moment you fetch it, and nothing goes back to the collection later, so a collection can be public for the few seconds the fetch takes and private again immediately after. The videos it handed over keep getting identified either way.

Open the collection, tap Share, and copy the link. What lands on your clipboard depends on where you did it: the app hands you a short vm.tiktok.com link, and the web gives you the long form that spells out the handle and the collection name. Both work, so paste whichever one you have.

The short link is worth a word of warning, because it is the same shape TikTok uses for a single video. If you paste one and get a video back rather than a collection, the link was a video all along, and CrateWire will say so rather than guessing.

Sign in and open the import page. It opens on Instagram, so switch it to the TikTok tab first, then drop the link into the collection link box that sits under the paste area and fetch the collection. It takes a few seconds and reads the collection page by page.

What comes back is a preview, not a finished import. Every video in the collection is listed and grouped by the DJ who posted it, because TikTok's own listing names the author of each one. You pick what to keep from there, and nothing is scanned until you say go.

Then the import runs the way every other one does. Each video gets the same four checks a single paste gets: the sound TikTok tagged, then the caption, then the comments, then the audio itself, with recognition built for sped-up, slowed and blended DJ clips. Tracks land while the scan is still running, so a long collection is readable long before it finishes, and the results page stays there afterwards to go back through.

Fetching the list uses one post ID from your monthly allowance. That is the fetch on its own, before a single track has been identified. Reading the videos then draws on the same allowance, one per video that is new to CrateWire, and a video someone else already ran through the catalog costs you nothing. A free account includes 5 post IDs a month, which is enough to see the shape of the thing rather than to work through a year of saves.

A single import carries at most 1,000 videos. Separately from that ceiling, one fetch reads a limited number of pages and gives up after a fixed stretch of time, so a large collection can come back part-way with a note saying there is more. The videos it did get are already in the preview, and fetching again continues from where it stopped instead of starting over. Each continuation uses a post ID of its own, which is the honest trade for not re-reading what you already have.

Collections are not the only route in, and they are not always the right one. The other is TikTok's data request, which returns your Favorites and your liked videos as a file of links: how to export your TikTok saved videos walks that one through. The import page takes the finished file on the same tab.

Pick by what you are after. A collection link is instant, it is the list you curated on purpose, and it arrives naming the DJ behind every video, which makes the preview readable at a glance. The export is the only way to get Favorites and likes out at all, since neither of those has a share link, but TikTok takes days to prepare it and the file names nobody. Curated crates come in by link; everything you ever tapped save on comes in by export.

If you only want one video read rather than a whole crate, neither route is worth the trouble. Paste the link into the TikTok song finder, or read how to find a song from a TikTok for the method behind the checks.