How to Download TikTok Captions, Hashtags, and Metadata — The Complete Data Export Guide
Quick Answer: Use yt-dlp --write-info-json to extract all available TikTok metadata (caption, hashtags, music info, engagement stats, creator data) as a structured JSON file alongside your video download. For bulk extraction, combine with --batch-file to process hundreds of URLs and export to CSV for analysis.
I downloaded 500 TikTok videos for a content analysis project last month. The videos were fine, but I realized I'd lost all the context — no captions, no hashtags, no view counts, no creator information. The video files were just anonymous MP4s sitting on my hard drive with zero searchable data.
It took me another two weeks to re-download everything with proper metadata extraction. Here's the workflow I built that now captures every data point TikTok provides, automatically, for every download.
What Metadata Can You Extract from TikTok?
