How to Save Facebook Videos to Your iPhone

You found a video on Facebook that you want to keep. Maybe it's a recipe Reel, or a video of your cousin's band that will be buried in the feed by next week. Facebook lets you "save" it, but that only adds a bookmark inside Facebook. Nothing lands in your Photos app, and a screen recording picks up every notification that arrives while it runs.

This guide shows how to save the real file from a public Facebook post to your iPhone, in about two minutes the first time and a few seconds after that.

The quick answer

Get TVDL Pro, add the TVDL Pro shortcut, and enter the email you paid with. Then, on any public Facebook video, tap Share, pick TVDL Pro, and the video saves to Photos. If Facebook doesn't show TVDL Pro, tap Copy Link, open Shortcuts, run TVDL Pro and paste the link.

Facebook is part of TVDL Pro. It costs $5 a month, or $48 a year (which works out to $4 a month), and there is a Lifetime plan. The free TVDL shortcut covers X, Bluesky and Mastodon, not Facebook.

Step by step

1. Set up Pro once. Subscribe on the Pro page, open the TVDL Pro shortcut link on your iPhone, tap Add Shortcut, and enter the email you paid with. That email is how the shortcut knows you're on Pro.
2. Open the Share menu. In the Facebook app, find the video or Reel and tap Share under it. On a Reel, the share arrow sits on the right side of the screen.
3. Pick TVDL Pro. If you see the iPhone share sheet, scroll the row of apps and tap TVDL Pro. If you only see Facebook's own options, read the next section.
4. Wait a few seconds. TVDL Pro fetches the video and saves it. Open Photos and it's at the top of your library.

The first time, iOS asks whether TVDL Pro can save to Photos. Tap Allow and it won't ask again.

9:41

Sam@sam.clips · 2h

Golden hour on the pier, in slow motion.

0:18

42

89

1.2K

Saved to Camera Roll

Post by @sam.clips

Done

Messages

Notes

Mail

AirDrop

TVDL ProPRO

›

Copy link

›

Tap Share on the post and pick TVDL Pro. Straight to your Photos.

Where Facebook hides the share sheet

When you tap Share in the Facebook app, you get Facebook's own menu first: share to your feed, send in Messenger, share to a group. The iPhone share sheet, the one with TVDL Pro in it, is usually one more tap away behind a button labelled More, Share to... or a row of three dots. If it isn't where you expect, scroll sideways along the row of options in that menu.

If you can't find it at all, skip the share sheet. Tap Copy Link in the same menu, open the Shortcuts app, tap TVDL Pro, and paste the link when it asks. Same result.

You can also open the post in Safari at facebook.com, tap the Safari Share button, and pick TVDL Pro there.

Links from Messenger. If someone sends you a Facebook video in Messenger, long press the link in the chat and copy it, then run TVDL Pro in Shortcuts and paste. That works as long as the post itself is public. If the video was uploaded straight into the chat rather than shared from a post, there is no public link, and TVDL can't reach it.

What you can save from Facebook

TVDL Pro handles the main kinds of public Facebook posts:

• Videos from Pages, public profiles and the Watch tab.
• Reels, whether you copy the Reel's own link or the share link Facebook gives you.
• Photos from a public post or Page.
• Photo albums. When a public post has several photos, TVDL saves all of them to Photos in one go.
• Posts in public groups, as long as anyone can see the group without joining.

It understands the link formats the Facebook app and website hand out: facebook.com and m.facebook.com links to videos, Reels, photos and posts, the facebook.com/share/ links you get from Copy Link, and short fb.watch links. You don't need to tidy the link up first. Paste it the way Facebook gave it to you.

What it won't do is save a link that isn't a post. A Page's main link, someone's profile, a Marketplace listing or a search page has no single video in it, so TVDL will tell you it doesn't recognise the link. Open the specific post first, then share that.

The honest limits

Public posts only. TVDL sees what someone who isn't logged in to Facebook can see. That rules out private profiles, friends-only posts and private groups. If you can only see a video because you're friends with the person, TVDL can't reach it.

Facebook is new in Pro. I added it this week along with Threads, Reddit and Kuaishou (there's more on that in the launch post), and it's still in beta while I tune it. Most public posts save fine, but now and then one won't. When that happens TVDL shows a message and offers to send me the link, and I use those reports to find what broke and fix it. Please send them.

Daily limits. Pro has generous daily limits set for personal use. Saving the videos you actually want to keep won't come near them.

iOS version. TVDL works on iOS 13 and later. I've tested it on iOS 27, and the steps above are the same on every version.

Saving a public video doesn't notify the person who posted it. If you repost someone's video, credit them.

Why this is a Pro feature

I've built TVDL on my own since 2018. The free shortcut has always covered X, and now Bluesky and Mastodon too, and it will stay free. Facebook is different. Getting a clean file out of it takes servers and download engines that cost real money every time someone saves a video, and Pro is what pays for that. You can see every app TVDL works with, free and Pro, on the supported platforms page.

If you save Facebook videos more than once in a while, TVDL Pro is the simplest way I know to do it on an iPhone. Set it up once, and next time you see a video worth keeping, it's two taps from the feed to your Photos.