What's a good service to use for sharing home videos?

Jeff Berman_ · Jan 9, 2017

Hi, I was hoping some of you experts could give some advice. We have a handful of family videos that we want to share with friends and family. Does anyone have a recommendation of a video sharing site for hosting it at full (or decent) quality? A pay service is fine.

iCloud photo sharing won't work because some of the videos are longer than 5 minutes. YouTube doesn't like some of them because they contain music in the background, which YouTube says violates copyrights. Flickr limits playback to three minutes or something.

Some of these videos relate to each other, so it'd be nice if when you watched one of them, the service made it easy to discover other videos of ours. YouTube does this, as does Flickr. A file sharing service like DropBox doesn't, unless I'm missing something. I just tried Amazon Prime Photos, and it's pretty bare bones, too. After watching a video, you're left sitting at a black screen (this is on iPhone). I don't think it transcodes separate versions for different devices, either, like some services do.

Any suggestions? Maybe SmugMug (although it seems like overkill for sharing a few home movies with friends)? Alternatively, I have a hosted web site -- is there any video sharing software that can be installed to do this?

Thanks!

expressivecanvas · Jan 9, 2017

I recommend Vimeo.

Patrick

Joe Pa · Jan 9, 2017

Vimeo should provide you with everything you're looking for.

Andrew S10 · Jan 9, 2017

You could upload them to Youtube as unlisted videos and email the links to your friends and relatives.

larsbc · Jan 9, 2017

I have Smugmug for sharing/archiving my photos but upgraded it to included video uploading as well. Their video playback is a bit flakey. It works but usually requires pressing play, then pause, then play again. Playback can be a bit slow/laggy at times, too.

I ended up adding a Vimeo acct as well. I got the plan just above free. Like you, I had issues posting some videos to services like Youtube or Facebook due to music copyright issues. No problem with Vimeo (plus for those videos that use such music, I keep them private, anyway). Vimeo streams more reliably. Also, you can put your videos into a single, password-protected Collection. Anyone who has the password for that collection can then see other videos in it as well. In fact, it can be set to auto-play the next video in the collection.

Jeff Berman_ · Jan 9, 2017

larsbc said:
I have Smugmug for sharing/archiving my photos but upgraded it to included video uploading as well. Their video playback is a bit flakey. It works but usually requires pressing play, then pause, then play again. Playback can be a bit slow/laggy at times, too.

I ended up adding a Vimeo acct as well.

Vimeo doesn't have photo sharing, right? So do you host your photos on Smugmug and somehow link videos from Smugmug to Vimeo? Or do you now have two separate sites, one for photos and one for videos?

I'm astounded that there aren't a bunch of services to share photos and videos, transcoding to fit the client, with commenting capabilities. Maybe the demand just isn't there?

larsbc · Jan 9, 2017

Jeff Berman_ said:
larsbc said:

I have Smugmug for sharing/archiving my photos but upgraded it to included video uploading as well. Their video playback is a bit flakey. It works but usually requires pressing play, then pause, then play again. Playback can be a bit slow/laggy at times, too.

I ended up adding a Vimeo acct as well.

Click to expand...

Vimeo doesn't have photo sharing, right? So do you host your photos on Smugmug and somehow link videos from Smugmug to Vimeo? Or do you now have two separate sites, one for photos and one for videos?

I'm astounded that there aren't a bunch of services to share photos and videos, transcoding to fit the client, with commenting capabilities. Maybe the demand just isn't there?

No, Vimeo doesn't do photo sharing.

On Smugmug, I can upload photos AND stills together, and they appear side-by-side in the galleries. But I don't like the video playback of Smugmug. I'll still use it, but I also bought an acct on Vimeo which is completely separate and in no way linked to Smugmug. Sorry if I was unclear.

If I had to get rid of one of them, it would be Vimeo. But as it stands, the price of the low end Vimeo package is affordable so I'll probably keep it, even though Smugmug offers similar features (but not as good streaming).

M Stewart · Jan 9, 2017

Andrew S10 said:
You could upload them to Youtube as unlisted videos and email the links to your friends and relatives.

That's what I've been doing for years. The quality is more than enough for the grabbed movie snapshots that I think should be shown to others in the family. Definitely not works of art.

GothamOddisee · Jan 10, 2017

Vimeo is indeed excellent, and Unlisted Youtube works a charm, here's another reliable solution:

Google Photos is both free and totally decent. You can share an album with all of your current videos, that grows over time, or send a link to each new video as it comes out. The quick compression/upload, auto backup on mobile and overall reliability are all quite helpful.

Downside: Google Photos level of video compression will not meet high expectations.

Jeff Berman_ · Mar 17, 2017

Everyone, thanks for all the good advice! You know, I ended up going with Smug Mug. It's not perfect but it let us do everything we wanted to do, with minimal UI weirdness. If SM didn't work out, we'd have gone with Vimeo.

Thanks again!

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