The 4 Best Sites for Sharing Private Home Videos With Family and Friends

There are websites and social communities out there that let you share videos online with the entire world. But in many cases, you might only be interested in private video sharing with family and friends.

For this purpose, I’d like to share four of the best sites for sharing videos privately on the internet.

1. Private Video Sharing on YouTube

In the case of YouTube, the service is built around the concept of community video sharing. So, keeping your video private isn’t completely intuitive. But it is possible, and it’s effortless.

The first step: Upload your video.

When you’re logged into YouTube, just click the video recorder icon on the top right of the screen. Then click Upload video. Under the privacy dropdown select Private.

You’ll notice there’s an Unlisted option as well. Both are a form of “private” sharing of videos, but it’s important to know the difference.

• Private means you can invite people to view the video. You’re allowed to invite up to 50 users to see your video. The video won’t show up in public YouTube search results. Any friend or family with the link can see the video, but only if you’ve invited them.
• Unlisted means that your video won’t show up in YouTube search results, but anyone with the link will be able to view the video. It’s also accessible to the public, whether or not someone has a YouTube account.

The level of privacy you want to give the video depends on what you’re sharing. So keep these differences in mind when you decide how you want to share the video.

Once you submit your video, you’ll need to give it time to upload, depending on the size.

On the video sharing screen, under the privacy dropdown, click on the Share button to add email addresses of people you want to share the video with.

Most people think of YouTube as a place where people go to broadcast your own show or public videos. It’s actually a great way to store and share a collection of private videos with your family and friends.

With just a couple of different privacy settings and email addresses to share with, you’re done. YouTube will automatically send the invite for them to check the video.

2. Share Videos With Vimeo

Vimeo is another great video sharing site with good privacy features. It’s a lot like YouTube as far as privacy goes. But unlike YouTube, it requires users to use a password to access your private video.

When you upload your file to Vimeo, you’ll see a Privacy dropdown box.

Click on the dropdown and select either “Only people with a password can see this video” or “Only people I choose can see this video.”

The second option will only allow you to choose other Vimeo members to share the video with. So, if you want to share with family members who don’t have a Vimeo account, your best option is the first one.

Once your video uploads, you can set the password for people to access it using the Password field.

You can also change the privacy setting any time you wish.

Under the Password field, you’ll find the link to the video that you can share with family and friends.

You can have a different password for each video so that you can easily control who has access to specific videos.

Vimeo is easily a top competitor to YouTube when it comes to sharing private videos with family and friends. It’s easy, and with a free account limit of 5 GB, you can share a lot of videos with everyone before coming close to running out of space.

3. Upload Your Video to Facebook

One of the easiest ways to share your video with only friends and family is by uploading it to your Facebook account. Since it’s so easy to limit posts to only family and friends, it makes sense that Facebook would probably be the first place you’d go to share your private home movies.

Most people think of YouTube when it comes to uploading and sharing videos. Few people take full advantage of the limited sharing functionality offered on Facebook.

Let’s see how convenient this is.

When you click to add a video (same button you use to share photos), you can change the privacy of the post to Specific friends.

After it uploads, the video is visible on your wall just like when you post comments or upload photos. However, the video isn’t published to the entire world. It’s only available to the specific people you’ve added.

Of course, you can skip posting it to your wall entirely, and instead make a private Facebook group just for family.

This way, you can post your video directly to the group. Only members of that group (your family or friends) will see it.

Using a Family or Friends Facebook group also allows for conversations and comments about the video with the same level of privacy.

4. Share Private Videos Using Cloud Storage

Another simple approach to privately sharing videos with people is by using cloud storage.

I use Google Drive for this purpose, but Dropbox or OneDrive will work just as well.

The best approach is to create a special folder in Google Drive and build the privacy for the folder. This will default the privacy of everything you upload inside of that folder to use the same privacy settings.

Once you upload a video into that folder, you can tweak the privacy settings by right clicking on the video and clicking on Share.

This is where you can get the link to send to your family or friends. Or just use the quick share icon if you want to send it to friends in Gmail, Google Plus, Facebook or Twitter.

At the bottom of the share settings for each video, you can tighten up security a little more by preventing any of the people you’ve shared it with from changing video access or sharing it with additional people.

You can also prevent people from downloading, printing, or copying the file as well.

Usually if you’re sharing with family and friends this shouldn’t be a concern. But if you are extra protective of your privacy, these options are available in Google Drive.

Again, you can accomplish the same thing with other cloud sharing services.

Share Videos Privately (and Painlessly!)

Creating a collection of home videos and vacation clips to share with all of your family and friends doesn’t have to be complicated or painful.

All the services and sites above make it as simple as uploading the files to your account and adjusting privacy and share settings. It doesn’t get much easier than that!

If you are more interested in sharing more public viral videos, we’ve got you covered there as well!

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