How to Download All Videos From a Telegram Channel

There is no way to make this pleasant on a phone, so the short answer is to move to a computer. To download all videos from a Telegram channel, open the channel in a desktop app, filter the view so only videos are showing, and hand the whole thing to a download queue that works through it while you get on with something else. TelegramBuddy is a free desktop app for macOS and Windows that does exactly this: it can scan a channel’s entire history, pick out every video, and write the files straight into a folder on your disk.

The rest of this guide covers the steps, plus the part people usually get wrong — the difference between grabbing the videos you can currently see and grabbing every video the channel has ever posted.

Why tapping through videos on your phone doesn’t scale

On mobile, saving a video is a per-video decision. You find it, you tap it, you wait, you scroll on. That is fine for three videos and miserable for three hundred, and the cost grows with every video rather than staying flat.

Three things make it worse as the channel gets bigger:

• You lose your place. After a hundred videos you are guessing about which ones you already have and which you skipped.
• Interruptions are expensive. Lose signal halfway through a 1.5 GB file and you are generally starting that file again.
• The phone is not where the files are useful. Most people want these videos in a folder they can sort, back up, or edit from — not buried in an app’s storage.

Every hand-driven approach has that same shape: the effort grows with the number of videos. What you want instead is to make one decision — “all the videos in this channel” — and let software do the counting.

What you need before the first download

1. The app on your computer. TelegramBuddy is free and runs on macOS and Windows; on Linux you run it from source. It is a normal desktop program — a Python backend with a React interface in a native window — not a bot and not a website. See the download page for the current state of the builds.
2. A Telegram api_id and api_hash. On first run the app asks for these two values. You get them free at my.telegram.org under “API development tools”; it takes a couple of minutes and you do it once. An api_id is just a registration number that tells Telegram which app is connecting. Every install uses its own because Telegram counts rate limits against the api_id, so your usage stays yours. If that step is new to you, here is a walkthrough.
3. Your own Telegram account. You sign in by scanning a QR code or entering your phone number. The session is saved as a file on your computer. There is no TelegramBuddy account and no TelegramBuddy server in the middle — the app talks to Telegram directly and files are written to local disk.
4. Access to the channel. Public channels work by @username. Private channels and groups work too, as long as you are already a member. If the channel is not in your chat list, a t.me/+ invite link, a t.me/c/<id>/<msg> message link, a username or a numeric id will open it.

How to download all videos from a Telegram channel

1. Open the channel. Pick it from your chat list, or paste a link, username or id into the box if it is not there.
2. Switch to Gallery view. Chat view shows the conversation as it was written — text and media together, oldest to newest. Gallery view drops the text and shows only the media as a grid of thumbnails, which is what you want here.
3. Set the filter to Videos. The gallery filters by All media, Photos, Videos, Files, Music, Voice or GIFs. With Videos selected you are looking at nothing but video. If you want a subset, you can also search captions and file names, or set a date range — useful when you only want, say, this year.
4. Decide how much history you are taking. Either select what is on screen, or start a bulk download that scans the channel from the beginning. The next section explains the difference, because it matters.
5. Set your destination and concurrency. Choose the folder, decide whether the app should split media into Photos / Videos / Files / Music / Voice subfolders, and set how many downloads may run at once.
6. Start it, then leave it alone. The queue shows what is running, waiting and done. You can pause, resume, cancel or retry individual items, and queue up several chats at the same time if you have more than one channel to work through.

Selecting what’s loaded vs. taking the whole history

These are two different operations and they answer two different questions.

	Select what’s loaded	Bulk download the chat
Covers	the messages currently loaded in the view	every matching file in the channel, scanned from the start
Good for	recent videos, or a filtered date range you can see	“just get all of it”
Scrolling required	yes — older messages load as you scroll up	no
Selection tools	click, shift-click a range, Select all, Files only, Texts only	none needed

The trap is assuming a “Select all” in a scrolling view means the whole channel. It means everything loaded so far. If the channel has 900 videos going back four years and you have scrolled through two months of them, a select-all covers two months. When you want the archive, use the bulk download — it walks the full history itself so you never have to scroll to the beginning.

One thing worth saying plainly: keep only what you have the right to keep. A channel full of other people’s paid courses or ripped films does not become yours because the download was convenient.

What happens when a large video is interrupted

Large files are where a downloader either earns its keep or wastes your evening. TelegramBuddy streams a big file into a temporary .part file as it arrives. If you pause it, if your connection drops, or if you quit the app, the next attempt picks up at the byte where it stopped rather than starting over. Photos and small files are re-fetched whole instead, because for a 200 KB file the bookkeeping costs more than the bytes.

Two more behaviours matter over a long run:

• Finished files are skipped. Point the app at the same channel next month and it only fetches what is new. That makes “keep this channel mirrored” a repeatable job rather than a one-off effort.
• Rate limits are handled for you. When Telegram tells an app to slow down — a flood wait — the app waits out the interval and carries on instead of failing the queue. You may see a download idle for a while; that is it being polite, not broken.

There is more on the mechanics in resuming interrupted downloads.

Where the video files end up

Files go into one folder per chat, optionally split into subfolders by media type. Naming follows a simple rule:

• If Telegram has a file name for the video, that name is kept.
• Most photos and videos are posted without a file name, so those are named after their message id — which keeps them unique and in posting order.
• If a real name clash happens, the message id is appended in brackets so nothing is silently overwritten.

Each file’s date is set to the date the message was posted, not the moment you downloaded it. Sort the folder by date in Finder or Explorer and you get the channel’s timeline back, which is hard to reconstruct later if every file claims to be from today.

If you are on a Mac and want the platform-specific details, see saving Telegram videos on a Mac.

Where to go next

If you have not set up your api_id yet, start there — it is the only step that involves a website, and nothing works until it is done. And if you want the words as well as the video, message text can be saved to a .txt file, and a whole chat can be exported as a readable HTML page or JSON with the media linked. The features page is the fastest way to check whether your particular situation is covered.