Designing a native map for the places TikTok already knows about

Written January 2025, revisited September 2026. The idea held up. Some of what I wrote under it didn't, and the last section says what changed.

I use TikTok to find places. Restaurants around New York, things to do on a weekend, events I would never have heard about otherwise.

Planning a trip to Japan, I saved videos to a favorites folder until the folder became the itinerary — a dozen places stacked in a feed, with no way to see how any of them sat next to each other.

TikTok already knows where its videos were shot. It just won't show me.

So the workaround is app-switching. Find the place in a video, copy the name, open Maps, drop a pin, come back. Every saved video is a location the app is holding and refusing to put anywhere I can use it.

So I drew the map TikTok already had the data for, built from the location metadata attached to videos.

Two days is enough to draw a surface and not enough to check a source. The strongest evidence here was the favorites folder, a workaround I built for myself, and I buried it under a borrowed statistic I had never traced. When I came back to this page I went looking for that statistic and could not find anyone who had actually run the study, so it is gone rather than corrected.

The idea itself aged better. TikTok has since shipped a local feed, and it is still a feed — no saved places, nothing laid out in space. The folder I made for Japan would work the same way today.

What I would change is the privacy question. Instagram launched a map in 2025 and the conversation was entirely about who could see where you had been, not about finding anything. Drawn again, that answer belongs on the first screen instead of in a settings menu.