Do You Have To Post A TikTok Video To Save It As A Draft?

You may be accustomed to enabling the “Save to device” option when you upload your TikTok posts. It’s not only an easy way to keep your TikTok content archived, though. It’s also a handy safeguard that makes the video available if you ever want to post it somewhere else, or if you have to reupload it to the app’s editor to make changes before reposting it.

Some TikTok users think that’s the only way to save their work, even if they don’t want the post to go live on the social media platform.

There’s a much easier method, though. In fact, there are two of them.

How To Save TikTok Drafts Without Posting

You can either save your draft video directly in the TikTok app on your device, or you can download the draft to your phone’s camera reel. Here’s the way to do each.

Saving a Draft on TikTok

There’s no muss, no fuss with this method.

Shoot and edit your video as you normally would. When you have to (or want to) stop and save the content as a draft, tap the “Next” button at the bottom right of the in-app editor to move on to the “Posting” screen. However, instead of clicking on “Post” when you’ve added details and chosen any other desired option, hit the “Drafts” button to the left of the “Post” button.

That will save the video to your drafts folder, located in the content grid on your TikTok profile. You can reopen it and continue work in the editor at any time, just by visiting your profile and tapping on the video’s thumbnail.

One important caution: when you save a TikTok draft to your profile, it’s only accessible from the phone you used to save it. You won’t see it in your profile, and you can’t resume editing it if you’re on any other device. Additional caution: if you delete the app from your phone, the draft will disappear and won’t be resurrected.

Saving a Draft on Your Camera Reel

This process is almost as easy.

While you’re in the editing screen, tap the “down” arrow on the right-hand menu, scroll down, and choose the last option labeled “Save.” Then select “Post to save without watermark.” The draft video will now be downloaded to your camera reel. If you’d prefer, you can instead finish up and post the video with the “Save to device” option enabled on the Posting page.

There’s just one problem, though. These methods also create a TikTok post with your draft video, so you’ll have to find the post in your content grid and delete it (unless you want other users to be able to see it).

If you want to save a draft after you’ve already saved it to your content grid, no problem. Just open it from the grid, tap “Save” and then “Post to save without watermark.” You’ll still have to delete the TikTok post once you’ve got the content safely on your camera reel.

Pro tip: Always save your drafts and finished videos to your phone. You never know when you might lose your work because of an app problem, or when you might want to transfer a video to a different device or the cloud for safekeeping.