Some of the guides on this blog cite AmpClip research into TikTok Photo Mode slideshows. This page explains where those numbers come from, what we checked by eye, and what the data can’t tell you. If a number on this blog isn’t covered here, treat it as coming from somewhere else, and that page should say where.
What’s in the dataset
- 3,715 public TikTok Photo Mode (slideshow) posts from 1,128 creators.
- Collected in September 2026 with a TikTok scraper run through Apify. The posts themselves were published between 2022 and mid-September 2026.
- Only Photo Mode posts were kept. Videos were dropped, and duplicates were removed.
How the accounts were chosen
We ran a sweep for faceless slideshow accounts: pages that post photos and text instead of someone talking to the camera. We started from slideshow accounts we had collected in earlier research, then found more through TikTok user search, hashtag search, and popular-post pulls in niches like quotes, self-improvement, aesthetics, gym, beauty, and tips. After that we ran targeted passes for moods we had too few examples of, such as nostalgia, romance and longing, grief, faith, and missing home.
Every post that passed the filters (public, Photo Mode, not a duplicate) went into the final “keep” set. That set is the 3,715 posts counted here.
This is not a random sample of TikTok. Many posts came from popular-tab pulls and searches, so the set leans toward posts that were already doing well and toward the niches we searched for. The niche labels are ours, not TikTok’s.
How slides were counted
We counted the images in each post. In 3,713 of the 3,715 posts, the export listed a cover thumbnail as the first image. That thumbnail isn’t a slide people swipe through, so we removed it before counting.
| Slide count | Posts |
|---|---|
| 1 | 479 |
| 2–5 | 1,125 |
| 6–10 | 1,216 |
| 11–20 | 526 |
| 21–35 | 369 |
Across all 3,715 posts the median was 6 slides, the mean was 8.5, and counts ranged from 1 to 35. 479 posts were a single image. Quite a few posts sit right at the 35-slide top end, so the collection tool may have cut off some very long carousels. Read the top bucket as “21 or more.”
What we checked by eye, and what we didn’t
Checked: we opened 120 posts and reviewed them slide by slide in an AI-assisted research pass. For each one we noted the hook, the imagery, how the story moves from slide to slide, and how much the post depends on its audio. About a third got a full review of every slide; the rest were partial. The format names in our guides (soft affirmations, mood dumps, nostalgia grids and so on) come from those reviews plus captions and first slides.
Not checked, or unknown:
- Audio. We recorded each post’s sound information but didn’t listen to the audio. We don’t know whether a given sound was an artist’s official sound or part of a paid campaign.
- Faceless status. Accounts were tagged as faceless at the account level. We didn’t confirm every post.
- Slide counts outside the 120 reviewed posts are machine counts from the image list, not visual checks.
- Genre-to-format pairings in our guides (for example, nostalgia grids for country) are ideas to test, not results measured from this data.
What we don’t publish from this data
- No view, like, or save benchmarks. The export recorded counts when each post was scraped, without reliable timestamps, and the sample leans toward popular posts. Averages from it would mislead.
- No claims about streams. Nothing in this data connects a TikTok post to listening on Spotify, Apple Music, or anywhere else, so we don’t claim slideshows turn into streams.
Where this research shows up
The slide-length figures and format patterns are used in how to promote your music on TikTok without showing your face and TikTok Photo Mode for musicians. If we update the dataset or the counting method, we’ll update this page and the guides that cite it.