mikf
TikTok Cookies issue
#8338
For many weeks now I can't get to download private videos or videos you have to be logged in from TikTok:
This post may not be comfortable for some audiences. Log in for access. Use --cookies-from-browser or --cookies for the authentication. See https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/FAQ#how-do-i-pass-cookies-to-yt-dlp for how to manually pass cookies
I have cookies set and also forward cookies to ytdl in the config.
But I'm not sure the issue is with gallery-dl because I can't download private accounts with yt-dlp directly either. Is this issue known or is the issue on my end?
It works again via yt-dlp but still not via gallery-dl. Maybe I forgot something in the config, what do I need to put in the gallery.conf to make it work properly?
I’m having the same issue. I try to download whole TikTok profile, It works on yt-dlp, but it doesn’t work on gallery-dl. I don’t know why. Is the yt-dlp version used by gallery-dl outdated? How can I check which version of yt-dlp gallery-dl is using?
Are you using the compiled binaries by any chance? If so, try installing it through pip instead.
I had the same issue when downloading TikTok with gallery-dl.exe + yt-dlp.exe but Python version works, at least for me. I think there's a problem passing the cookies.
Within the past few months there was a rewrite of the yt-dlp TikTok account extraction code that fixed infinite looping issues, but that also unintentionally resulted in private accounts no longer working. Thankfully it has nothing to do with cookies and was just a quirk in the way TikTok responded to requests.
A few weeks after the affected release, I and bashonly introduced a fix for it into yt-dlp, but as others mention, if you're not using the most up-to-date version (which is most likely the case if you're using a gallery-dl binary), you'll need to install the latest version [separately].
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases/tag/2025.10.14
Here is the earliest release that will work.
@mikf Might I suggest we bump the version of the bundled yt-dlp soon to address this? I think that's how this works, am I right?
I should really get to work on removing this dependency for TikTok accounts soon. The one benefit we get from it (reducing code duplication and only fixing bugs in one place) clearly doesn't get us very far when a lot of users run with the binaries.
There will most likely be a new release with binaries bundling the latest yt-dlp this coming weekend or you use a binary from https://github.com/gdl-org/builds/releases or run gallery-dl --update-to dev
https://github.com/mikf/gallery-dl/issues/6582#issuecomment-3626128819
