TikTok scheduler: video, photo posts, privacy, drafts

TikTok has no scheduler for ordinary accounts and its API is the strictest of the twelve about what a video must look like. A file that passes everywhere else fails on TikTok hours after it was queued, with an error about frame rate that mentions no number. Preflight publishes through the Content Posting API and checks the things TikTok checks, before the upload rather than after it. How to schedule TikTok posts is the walkthrough; this page is the integration.

What goes out

A video, or a photo post of up to 35 pictures. The caption takes 2,200 characters on a video and 4,000 on a photo post, where the first line is also the post's title and TikTok shows 90 characters of it. For each post you choose who sees it: everyone, followers, mutual friends or only you; whether duets, stitches and comments are allowed; whether it is your own brand's content or a paid partnership, which TikTok refuses on a private post; and whether it goes out at all or lands in your TikTok inbox as a draft to finish in the app, with the music and effects the API has no access to. Photo posts can ask TikTok to add music.

Connecting an account

Connect with TikTok. Preflight asks for your profile, your stats, upload, publish and the list of your videos. The last one is what the view, like, comment and share counts come from; without it the figures stay blank, and the profile scope is what makes a link to the published video possible at all, since TikTok hands out no username without it. Any account type works, personal or business, with no verification step.

What is checked before upload

At connect time and again before every publish, Preflight asks TikTok's creator endpoint what this creator may do: which privacy levels are open to them, whether duets and stitches are switched off on the account, and the longest video this creator may post, which is often 3 or 5 minutes rather than the API's 10. A post that breaks any of them is refused here with the reason. The file is held to /limits/tiktok: 3 seconds to 10 minutes, 4 GB, MP4, MOV or WebM, 23 to 60 frames per second, and 360 to 4,096 pixels on each side. The frame rate is measured in the browser when you upload, so the warning appears while you can still re-encode. More than five hashtags earns a note that TikTok's own app stops there.

Photo posts are different: TikTok will not take picture bytes and fetches them itself from a domain verified in its developer console. Where that is not set up, the composer says so instead of letting the post fail at publish time.

What the API will not do

A published TikTok cannot be edited or deleted through the API; both happen in the app. Comments cannot be read or answered, and there is no first comment. Until the account grants the video list scope, no figures come back. These are TikTok's rules, not Preflight's, and the same ones apply to every scheduler.

In the API

Every option on this page has a field in the public API and a parameter in the MCP server: privacy level, duet, stitch and comment flags, draft, brand and branded content, music, and the photo cover index. The checks run on an API post exactly as on one from the composer, so an agent is told about the frame rate too. The free plan at pricing includes TikTok.