Facebook Messenger has become one of the most convenient way of communicating, as it allows it users to reach people anytime and anywhere for free. One of the perks of Messenger is the ability to send videos. This way, you don’t have to share a video on your Facebook wall; instead, you can just privately send it to the person or group it is intended for.
Have you ever wanted to download videos directly from Facebook Messenger?
Have you wanted to keep a video on your phone rather than trusting it to the social network? Are you proud of a video you made or took part in and want to keep it on your own device? This tutorial will show you how to download videos from Facebook Messenger and store them on your own device..
For a while, you could watch a video on Facebook Messenger and hit the download icon at the bottom of the page to download the video. Then after a couple of Facebook updates, that download option seems to have disappeared.
What was once a super simple process has become slightly more difficult. I imagine Facebook wants to keep you on the platform (AKA walled garden) as much as possible and would rather you watch the video on their app rather than on your phone itself.
The internet has other ideas though, as always, and has come up with two alternative workarounds. There are more options but they tend to involve downloading and using random software, which isn’t ideal. None of these options requires anything but a web browser or a web app.
The bottom line is if the download option is no longer available from your Facebook Messenger, you can still download videos.
Before the download icon disappeared from the app, you could play videos right from within Facebook Messenger, and then you would see a download option at the end.
Alternatively, on iPhones, you could press and hold on the video and see Save as a dialog option. If you no longer see that option, all is not lost as there are other ways to get what we want.
Download Facebook Messenger Videos on Windows
This approach works for downloading Facebook Messenger videos using your Windows Computer.
- Log in to your Facebook account.
- Click the Messages icon to open
your Chats history. Then go to the conversation with the video you want to download.
- On the left side of the video, you will find a three-dot icon (More). Click it and select Save to Facebook.
- Then click View your Saved Items. This will open a new tab in your browser.
- In the new tab, you will see the My Collections screen. Under All,
you will see the video you saved.
- Click on the video, and it will automatically download to your computer. You can find the video in the Downloads folder in your computer.
- Once you have downloaded the video, you can choose to Unsave it from your Facebook account by clicking on the three-dots icon next to the Add to Collection button, and clicking Unsave.
Use a Web Browser Trick
This is a widely publicized hack that enables you to download videos from Facebook Messenger. It extracts the URL of the video, switches it to the mobile version of the page and lets you inspect the element and download the video. The process works like this:
- Navigate to the video you want to download.
- Right-click it and select ‘Copy video URL at current time’.
- Paste that URL into a browser tab, remove the www. part and replace it with m. to access the mobile version.
- Load the page and play the video.
- Right click and select Inspect or use Alt Option + Cmd + J on Mac.
- Located the video URL, ending in MP4 and copy it.
- Paste that into another tab and let it play.
- Right-click that video and select Save Video As.
This process is used across the internet on all kinds of websites to isolate the video file to download. It works on most browsers that have a developer console and while there are a few steps, it is actually very straightforward to do.
Use FBdown.net to download videos from Facebook Messenger
FBdown.net is a video downloader website that can make short work of downloading videos from Facebook Messenger. You still need to capture the video URL using Steps 1 to 6 but instead of downloading it from a browser tab, you can use this web app instead. If you find that Save As isn’t working, this is where you need to go.
- Follow Steps 1 to 6 above to capture the video URL.
- Navigate to FBdown.net.
- Paste the URL into the center box and hit Download.
- Download the video and save it to a location of your choice.
As long as you captured the video URL correctly, the website will locate and identify the video and then download it onto your device. It works on mobile devices and on desktop computers. This method works quickly and effectively. I tested it twice using the Brave browser on Windows 10 and it literally took only seconds to download a 30-second video from Facebook Messenger.
Download Facebook Messenger Videos on Android
Downloading a video from Facebook Messenger to your Android device is pretty much straightforward.
- Open Messenger, and open the conversation with the video you want to download.
- Long press the video, and there will be options available for you to Save Video, Forward, or Remove.
- Tap Save Video.
Disclaimer: Some pages on this site may include an affiliate link. This does not effect our editorial in any way.