TikTok is a popular short-form video app that allows users to create, share, and discover entertaining videos. The app has over 1 billion monthly active users and is one of the most downloaded apps in recent years.
TikTok provides creators with a variety of features to enhance their videos and grow their audience. Some key features include creative editing tools, viral hashtag challenges, duets, reactions, and live streaming. Recently, TikTok has also introduced new ecommerce features to allow creators to easily sell products through the app.
One lesser known TikTok feature that users often ask about is Favorites. Favorites allow you to bookmark videos you like so you can easily find them later. However, unlike other social media platforms, Favorites do not currently act as folders to categorize and organize your saved content. We’ll explore how Favorites work and the desire many users have for actual folders on TikTok.
What are Favorites on TikTok?
Favorites on TikTok allow users to bookmark videos that they want to save and easily access later. When a user taps the heart icon on a video, it gets added to their Favorites list. This serves as a way to curate and organize content that a user particularly enjoys.
Favorites make it easy for users to return to videos they liked and wanted to keep. Rather than having to hunt down a video again later, the user can simply open their Favorites tab in the TikTok app and find all their bookmarked videos in one place.
TikTok users tend to add videos to their Favorites for a variety of reasons. This includes funny videos they want to rewatch, informative or educational content they want to reference, recipes or DIY projects to try later, dances or challenges to practice, and more. Favorites help users bookmark this content for quick access.
Overall, Favorites serve as a feature for curating and organizing a user’s favorite TikTok videos into one saved collection. This allows users to easily find and access videos they enjoyed and wanted to save for later viewing.
Do Favorites act like folders?
Favorites on TikTok allow users to bookmark videos they like and find them in one collected space. However, Favorites do not provide the full functionality of folders or collections.
When you favorite a video on TikTok, it gets added to your general Favorites tab where all bookmarked videos are housed. You can scroll through and find favorites you’ve saved over time. While helpful for aggregating liked videos in one place, the Favorites tab does not allow you to further organize videos into separate folders or collections like some users desire.
According to sources, TikTok has tested and slowly rolled out some features that provide options for organizing Favorites, but not full folder functionality [1]. The “Collections” option allows favoriting videos to multiple Collections rather than just the general Favorites tab. However, Collections are limited in organization and can only be accessed on mobile, not desktop [2].
So in summary, while Favorites provide a space to easily find liked videos, TikTok does not yet have full folder or collection capabilities to categorize and organize Favorites in a robust, customizable way.
Ways to organize Favorites
While TikTok doesn’t have traditional folders for organizing Favorites, there are some strategies users have come up with to categorize their Favorites collections:
One method is to use hashtags in the description of each Favorite video. For example, you could tag a cooking video with #cooking, a dance video with #dance, and a pet video with #pets. Then when viewing your Favorites, you can search for a specific hashtag to pull up all the videos tagged with it. As noted in this Popsugar article, this allows you to “search your Favorites as if they were separated into folders.”
Another approach is organizing Favorites by topics in your biography section. As explained in this WikiHow guide, you can list different categories like “Dance Videos” or “Cooking Favorites” in your bio. Then when people click on that category, it will only show the Favorites related to that topic.
You can also manually arrange your Favorites by the order you want to view them in. Newer Favorites are added to the bottom, but you can long-press to rearrange the videos how you like. This lets you group types of videos together, like keeping all your DIY tutorials in one section.
While not a perfect system, these methods allow for some basic organization of the Favorites feature until more advanced folders arrive.
Limitations of Favorites
One of the biggest limitations of TikTok’s Favorites feature is the lack of subfolders or other advanced organizational features. When a user favorites a video, it simply gets added to their main Favorites list without any options to sort or categorize (Hitc). Unlike platforms like YouTube that allow you to create playlists to organize your favorite videos, TikTok’s Favorites act as one continuous scrolling list.
There is no way to divide up Favorites into separate folders or subsections. Whether you want to save cooking videos separate from dance videos, or organize by topic, everything gets lumped together. This can make it increasingly difficult to scroll through and find a specific Favorite as the list grows longer.
Without subfolders, some users feel the Favorites feature loses utility once they’ve favorited more than a few dozen videos. The lack of sorting tools is one of the most highly requested features by users to improve Favorites (Hitc).
User desire for folders
There has been a strong demand from TikTok users for the app to implement folder or collection features. On platforms like Reddit, many users have posted requests for TikTok to add the ability to sort videos into folders or collections (Source). Users argue that having folders would make it easier to organize favorite videos and find them later.
Some users have expressed frustration that TikTok has not added folders yet despite many requests over time. There is speculation that the feature may be purposefully withheld to encourage continuous scrolling. However, many feel folders are a standard feature that leading social media platforms offer.
Overall, there is clearly significant demand among users for TikTok to implement folder or collection features natively within the app. Users want to save and organize their favorite videos more easily without resorting to third-party workarounds.
Potential folder features
Although TikTok does not currently have true folders, there are many ways the app could implement folder functionality based on user desires and features seen in other social media platforms. Some potential folder features TikTok could add include:
- Letting users create custom folders to categorize Favorites, such as folders for cooking videos, travel content, jokes, etc.
- Allowing drag-and-drop organization of Favorites into folders.
- Letting users name and color code folders for easy identification.
- Allowing folders to be kept private or made public for sharing.
- Letting users create nested folders for further organization.
- Adding folder search to easily find categorized Favorites.
- Allowing folders to be synced across devices.
Implementing more advanced folder features could help satisfy user desire for better Favorites organization. However, TikTok may also want to consider potential downsides, like increased complexity. Overall, enhanced folder functionality could significantly improve the Favorite experience.
Likelihood of folder implementation
While TikTok does not currently have traditional folder functionality, there are some signs that the platform may add more robust organizational features in the future. According to Lifewire, TikTok has been steadily rolling out more tools for creators to organize and manage their content. Playlists allow grouping videos together, but lack the hierarchical structure of folders.
TikTok product manager Drew Kirchhoff noted that “complex functionality like folders” was not a priority early on, but that the team understands users want more tools to manage a growing library of videos as the app evolves (Lifewire). Popular requests for folder features on Reddit and social media indicate significant user demand.
As TikTok continues to optimize for creator experience, folders could provide an intuitive way to organize Favorites and content. However, the rollout timeline remains unclear. TikTok may gauge demand and explore alternative solutions before fully committing to traditional folders. But the groundwork of playlists and Collections hints that more robust organizational systems are on the horizon.
Workarounds and Third-Party Apps
Since TikTok doesn’t currently have folders, some users rely on third-party apps to help organize their Favorites. Popular options include:
Notion – This productivity app lets you create customized databases to categorize TikTok videos. Many fans use Notion to build aesthetic TikTok libraries organized by topic, mood, or other categories (source).
ClickUp – This project management platform includes tools to organize TikTok videos into custom lists and folders. The flexibility makes it popular for building curated libraries (source).
Todoist – Users can create projects and sub-projects to sort TikTok videos however they like. The app also enables users to add notes and tags to videos.
While third-party options provide helpful organization, many fans still want built-in folders natively within TikTok. Until then, these apps offer creative workarounds.
Conclusion
In summary, while TikTok currently does not have specific folders for organizing Favorites, the Favorites feature does allow users to bookmark and save videos into a dedicated area. Favorites don’t quite act as folders, as there are no subfolders or ways to categorize Favorites. However, users can create themed Favorites pages and use hashtags to organize their saved content to an extent.
While not an exact replacement for folders, the Favorites feature provides some ability to bookmark and group videos of interest. Many users have expressed a desire for full folder functionality within TikTok, and third party apps provide workarounds. But there has been no official confirmation from TikTok on plans to implement folder features.
So in answer to the main question, no, TikTok does not currently have specific folders for Favorites. The Favorites feature allows for some basic organization of liked videos, but does not provide the full functionality of folders. TikTok may add more advanced organizational features in the future, but there is no folder structure for Favorites as of now.
