How to Share Photos, Videos, and More Online

Got a vacation video that the world needs to see? Think your music taste can't miss? Wish the grandparents several states away could see your kid's birthday pictures? Then you probably did well in kindergarten—you're a natural-born sharer...


While millions of people share pictures, music, videos, and even documents every day, it can still be pretty daunting to get started. We're going to walk you through the steps it takes to become a sharer (or broadcaster), using the most popular sites for the various types of media.

Share Your Favorite Videos: YouTube
YouTube doesn't need any introduction, does it? It's the poster child of Internet video, the site that TV networks and movie studios can't stand (unless they've cut a deal) and where the average person goes to find clips of... well, just about anything and everything.
YouTube is free—there are ads on the pages with your videos—but the site has some limitations. Whatever video you upload is restricted to 1GB in size or 10 minutes in duration, for example. On the plus side, a YouTube video can now be uploaded in high definition, if that's how it was shot. To ensure that the site displays your videos in all their glory, follow our guidelines. To share a file, first make sure it's in the right format. YouTube prefers videos in H.264, MPEG-2, or MPEG-4 format, but it works with Windows' AVI files and QuickTime's MOV files as well. YouTube particularly recommends using MPEG-4 files made with the DivX or Xvid codecs. To determine which format a certain file is in, right-click it and check the Properties dialog, or for even more data, install a tool such as the GSpot codec information appliance.

Ways to Upload
From the Web: Log in to your YouTube account, click the yellow Upload button in the upper right-hand corner, browse to your video on your hard drive, and then click Upload. You can add up to ten videos at a time. Enter all the information you can think of for each file: Give your video a title and search tags (the more of these the better), check whether it should be private or public, and wade through a slew of other options. You can always go back in later to edit this metadata, of course.




If you have more than ten videos to upload, visit the Multi-Video Upload page and just keep adding files. You can adjust the title, description, and tags for each file using this spreadsheet-like page before you click the Upload All Videos button.
Don't forget to pick a thumbnail for each video. YouTube will provide three choices pulled from the video's frames. Try to select one that best encapsulates what it's all about; this picture might be the only thing some potential viewers see.
From a mobile phone: Send phone-cam videos directly to your YouTube account. First, visit Mobile Setup, put in your phone number and service provider, and give your mobile profile a name. YouTube will give you an e-mail address to send such files to via MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service), and the site can text you in reply when the upload is complete. The Mobile Setup will let you specify if videos from your phone are public or private—that is, available only to specified YouTube friends.
Directly from a camera: Some modern pocket camcorders will upload for you. How they do it depends on the camera. Pure Digital's various Flip Mino cameras have integrated software, so you don't have to install anything; just plug the camera into the computer, enter your YouTube account info, do some quick edits, and send the video to the site. Cameras like the Samsung SC-HMX20C and Kodak Zi6 Pocket Video Camera come with software for editing video on your PC and uploading the finished product to YouTube. (For a wealth of other options, see "HD Video for Every Budget.")
Webcam software may also integrate YouTube uploading functionality. Logitech QuickCams, for example, have a quick-capture feature for talking-head shots. The YouTube button on that screen accesses a page for entering YouTube credentials, a title, and description, then handles the upload for you. All webcams, however, should work with the YouTube Quick Capture page. A Flash app on the Web page will load your video stream, let you record and preview your talking-head video, and upload it, all within seconds.

From integrated software: Plenty of programs have YouTube support built in. For example, take Google's own Picasa (Google also owns YouTube). Sure, it's primarily software for managing digital still pictures, but version 3.0 has a "Movie" icon in the toolbar. Select a few images, click that button, and you go to a Movie Maker page. Find an MP3 on your hard drive to serve as the soundtrack (something that's not copyrighted, of course) and Picasa generates a slideshow movie for you. There's a YouTube button on this page to make it a snap to upload directly. Of course, Picasa also manages any videos you have on your hard drive, if you so choose. Double-click one in the program and you'll find an "Upload to YouTube" button next to it.

Ways to Share

Social networks: Once it's uploaded to YouTube, the options for forwarding your video to the world beyond are enormous—and you can access most of them from the Web page on which your video lives. Click the "more share options" link under the video and you'll see options for not just quickly sharing a video with fellow YouTube account holders or posting it to your Facebook and MySpace page, but also for sending it to Orkut, Digg, Microsoft Live Spaces, Bebo, hi5, and Mixx.
E-mail links: To e-mail the address of a video you (or anyone else) has posted, YouTube provides a link to copy and paste (read on to learn why you may want to change that URL slightly). And if you have the person's e-mail address in your YouTube address book, you can send the link direct.
When you send someone a link to a YouTube video, it typically looks like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i8_HvBcoEc
It may be restricted depending on your location and their location (country-wise). But if you send them the link address in the format from the embed code (note the slight difference in the URL below):
http://www.youtube.com/v/-i8_HvBcoEc&hl
Then just about anyone, anywhere, can access it without restriction.
Contacts can be imported from Google's Gmail into your address book. Label each as friend or family or create a new label to help disseminate videos to the right people (your college frat buddies may prefer certain types of videos, while your grandparents may like...something else.) Anyone who subscribes to your channel is automatically in your Address book, and, in theory, you don't have to notify them at all.
Embedding: Almost any video on YouTube can be embedded into another Web page—the feature that made YouTube videos so ubiquitous. YouTube provides the code, which looks something like this:
<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/-i8_HvBcoEc&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/-i8_HvBcoEc&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>
Access your Web page or blog's code to embed this; it's just a copy-and-paste job, very simple.
If you want to embed just a part of a YouTube video, Splicd lets you specify the video and duration, and gives you new embed code with new start/stop times, so viewers don't get the whole thing. Very handy when someone uploads something that's filled with extraneous footage. On YouTube, shorter is always better.

Auto-blogging: Videos you upload can be sent directly to your blog. Visit the Blog Setup section in YouTube's Account Settings, where you can specify a Blogger, Friendster, WordPress, or LiveJournal account to which you videos will be automatically posted. Of course, the old-fashioned method of grabbing the code marked "embed" that comes with almost every shareable video in the universe works too, and gives you control over where you put the file, be it a blog, a social network, or just a static Web page.

Downloads: Is this less a method of sharing and more a method of stealing? We don't judge. There are definitely times when you have a legitimate need for a video from YouTube that you can store locally, rather than stream. Zamzar.com, a free file-conversion site, has a Download Videos tab for this very purpose. Put in the address for the YouTube video you want, select a file format to convert into, provide your e-mail address, and click convert. The site will e-mail you a link to download the converted file; you have 24 hours to download it before Zamzar obliterates the converted file (alternately, you can pay Zamzar to keep it).

A Firefox add-on called Video DownloadHelper places a button in your browser toolbar whenever you're on a page with a video the tool can convert and download, making it a breeze to snatch videos not just from YouTube but from many other sharing sites.


Syndication: Push people who watch your videos to subscribe using the Subscribe button on every page. It's great for those who frequently revisit YouTube. But they can also subscribe using RSS, which puts links to your new videos in their RSS reader—programs like Google Reader or Bloglines or FeedDemon—for instant viewing. You won't find the RSS icon or link on an individual video page; visit the full user page, where all videos are listed (such as http://www.youtube.com/user/username, where username is, zanily enough, the user's name) and you'll see the orange RSS icon in the browser address bar.

Other Video Sites:
 
Vimeo (www.vimeo.com) This site perfected displaying high-definition video long before YouTube did, and it sports a lot of high-quality content that you can watch at full screen without losing a thing. Files are limited to 500MB in size, and unless you join Vimeo's Plus service, for $59.95 a year, you can upload only one HD video per week. The Plus service gives you 1GB file uploads with no time limit, all in HD—and no ads.

DailyMotion (www.dailymotion.com) DailyMotion is totally free and puts no restrictions on file size or video duration—not even on how much you can upload per month. To join the site, you must become a "MotionMaker," which means you've signed a guarantee not to upload stuff you don't own (also known as copyrighted material). Don't try to trick them: DailyMotion checks each upload. The final downside? Ads on the front of each of your videos.

Facebook (www.facebook.com): The social network? The very one. The duration of each video can be 20 minutes max, and file size is limited to 2GB, but it's all free if you don't count the advertisements (but who notices ads on an already overly cluttered Facebook page?). If your social circle is entirely on FB, this is the no-brainer place to share, even if the quality in the end isn't as good as it is on other sites.

Motionbox (www.motionbox.com) New to the game, Motionbox specializes in HD content that looks fantastic even at full screen. If you become a member for $30 per year, Motionbox will let you upload files as large as 2GB, of any duration you want.