TikTok Content Publishing API: Videos, Photo Carousels & the Async Publishing Dance

You'd think posting a video to TikTok via API would be straightforward — upload a file, set a caption, done. Instead, you initialize a publish, TikTok pulls the video from your server, and you poll for status. Oh, and if you want to post photos? No PNGs allowed. The Problem TikTok's Content Publishing API is fully asynchronous. There's no "upload and get a post ID back" flow. Instead: You initialize a publish request — telling TikTok where to find your media TikTok pulls the media from your URL (yes, your file must be publicly accessible) You poll for status — the video goes through download, upload processing, and finally publishing If it fails, you check the failure reason — some are retryable, some aren't This is different from platforms like Twitter or LinkedIn where you push media directly. TikTok pulls it. That means your media hosting needs to serve files publicly, and you need to handle a state machine of publish statuses. And then there are the surprises: TikTok doesn't accept