Do you lot take a personal video that y'all want to share with your family unit and friends? The services that brand you circulate your everyday footage to the unabridged world may non be the best solution for sharing private family videos.

If you lot want to know the best means to share private videos online with those who are shut to you, go on reading.

How to Choose the Best Video Sharing Site for Your Needs

If you want to share individual family videos with other people, there are a few primal questions that you need to ask yourself before you lot settle on which service you're going to use.

For example:

  • Do you desire the video to exist available forever?
  • How big is the video?
  • Where is the video currently saved?
  • What format does the video utilise?
  • How like shooting fish in a barrel is it for the receiving party to view the video?

So, allow's have a look at how a few of the best means to share videos with family unit stack upward confronting these questions.

1. YouTube

youtube upload

Many people don't realize that YouTube provides a mode to upload videos and share them privately with other users. After all, YouTube is primarily congenital around its vast library of customs videos.

Simply non just is information technology possible to achieve, only it'south also remarkably straightforward to do.

Kickoff uploading a video to YouTube in the usual way by clicking on the icon in the upper right-hand corner. These days, all YouTube videos that are uploaded are set to private mode until you publish them.

youtube privacy video

However, y'all don't need to always publish them. YouTube offers ii options that will be useful for sharing private videos:

  • Private: You can invite people to view the video. Y'all're allowed to invite up to 50 users with YouTube accounts to see your video. The video won't prove upward in public YouTube search results. Any friend or family unit with the link tin come across the video, but simply if y'all've invited them.
  • Unlisted: Your video won't bear witness up in YouTube search results, but anyone with the link will exist able to view the video. It's also accessible to the public, whether or not someone has a YouTube account.

To choose your setting, open YouTube Studio and go to Content > Visibility.

YouTube does have some restrictions on length, only they won't be a problem for most users. The maximum size is capped at 128GB or 12 hours, whichever is less.

You tin can upload MOV, MPEG4, MP4, AVI, WMV, MPEGPS, FLV, 3GPP, WebM, DNxHR, ProRes, and CineForm videos.

ii. Facebook

facebook new post

Facebook has a lot of shortcomings regarding privacy. Some users may opt not to add together their videos to the network at all, particularly if they include private family content.

However, if you tin can expect past the privacy headlines, Facebook is one of the best ways to share videos online. About everyone has an account (including Grandma!) and choosing your audience for your video is relatively straightforward.

If you lot want to share a private video via Facebook, start creating a mail, then click on the Photo/Video tab at the bottom of the new postal service's window.

Facebook will prompt y'all to choose which file y'all want to upload. But before yous hit the Post push, make certain you choose who can see it.

facebook new post sharing

If you lot click on the Friends dropdown list, you volition see Public, Friends,Friends Except,Specific Friends, andOnly Me every bit options. Select Specific Friends and choose your friends from the popup list.

A Facebook video can be upwardly to 10GB in size and 240 minutes in length—that's less than YouTube. At that place'south besides an FPS cap of 30 and a minimum width of 600 pixels. If someone watches your private video on mobile, landscape and portrait videos will both display in a two:3 aspect ratio.

And call back, your friends and family unit will need a Facebook account in society to watch any private videos you want to share with them.

3. Cloud Storage Providers

share google drive file

A 3rd popular mode to share video online privately is to use a cloud storage provider. The large three names in the industry are Google Drive, OneDrive, and Dropbox, only at that place are lots of smaller services out there likewise.

Almost all cloud providers allow yous share your files—including videos—with other users, either via email or by using a shareable link.

However, instead of sharing videos on a case-by-case basis, if you want to share lots of content with your family unit (for example, Christmas videos or hymeneals videos), it might make more sense to ready the sharing at the folder level. That way, any videos you add to the specific folder will automatically inherit the correct sharing options.

To gear up binder sharing options in Google Drive, right-click on the binder'due south proper noun and go to either Share (for electronic mail sharing) or Go Shareable Link. The process is like on other deject providers.

In terms of restrictions, almost all file types are supported. The only constraint on size is the amount of free storage space you have in your cloud account.

Cloud storage providers are also a great style to share photos with people.

4. WeTransfer

wetransfer

The iii services we have looked at and then far share 2 common characteristics:

  • They require an business relationship to send the video.
  • They will shop your video for an space amount of time.

If you don't want to make an business relationship, or you're concerned nigh your video staying bachelor online for as well long, you could cheque out one of the many costless services that let you send large files online.

We retrieve WeTransfer is arguably the best. The free version of the app lets you send files up to 2GB in size. The video format, bitrate, and other metadata are not important.

Alas, nonetheless, at that place are a few noteworthy restrictions:

  • Videos are only available for seven days.
  • Y'all demand to know the email address of the people to whom you lot want to send the private video.
  • Yous can only add three electronic mail addresses.

If necessary, you can subscribe to WeTransfer Plus to remove the seven-day limit and increase the file size to 20GB.

The four services we've discussed in this article should exist enough for most people to be able to share individual videos and family unit videos.

Just make certain you lot choose the service that ticks the boxes yous need and yous'll be on your way to sharing videos hands.

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About The Author

Dan Price (1604 Articles Published)

Dan joined MakeUseOf in 2014 and has been Partnerships Director since July 2020. Achieve out to him for inquires virtually sponsored content, affiliate agreements, promotions, and whatever other forms of partnership. You can also find him roaming the show floor at CES in Las Vegas every year, say hello if you're going. Prior to his writing career, he was a Fiscal Consultant.

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