Google__ The Missing Manual - Kevin Purdy [53]
The photos and videos links let you hop directly to the Photos or Videos section of your profile, respectively. Click the photos link to head to the appropriate section, and Google+ automatically puts you in editing mode (as indicated by a red bar across the top of the page) so you can change things like whether any photos show up on your profile, and which photos show up prominently on your Profile page. Click the videos link to tell Google+ whether you want the Videos section included in your profile. When you have things set the way you want, click “Done editing” at the top of the page. (Editing Your Profile has more about editing your profile.)
Sharing Videos
NOW THAT YOU KNOW all about uploading and sharing photos on Google+, working with videos is a piece of cake. You share videos the same way you share photos—you can even share a video on its own or as part of an album.
Uploading Videos
You upload videos to your Google+ account the same way you do photos: upload them directly to the Photos page by clicking the “Upload new photos” button (there isn’t a separate button for videos), or as an attachment to a post (Adding Photos, Videos, Links, and Locations). You can also upload a video from your web-connected phone (Uploading from Your Phone), or by pulling a video over from Picasa Web Albums (Pulling Images from Picasa Web Albums). Anywhere you see a link or button for uploading photos, you can also upload one or more videos simply by choosing a video file instead of an image file.
Google+ can handle the same video formats that work on YouTube: AVI, MOV, MP4, and WMV files, as well as 3GP files from Android and other smartphone cameras and FLV files from Adobe Flash projects. Generally, any video that you can upload to Picasa Web Albums, YouTube, or any another Google service will run just fine in Google+.
TIP
If you have an Android phone, the Google+ app’s Instant Upload feature works for videos, too. Flip to Uploading photos automatically from an Android phone or tablet for details on setting it up.
Viewing and Editing Videos
Videos are kept in the same place as photos: on your Photos page, under the “Your albums” and “Photos from your posts” categories, as appropriate. They can even be part of an album along with photos. To differentiate videos from photos, Google+ puts a large sideways triangle icon (like a Play button) on videos. When people view one of your videos by clicking on it in a post or on your Profile page, it appears on a black background just like lightbox view for photos. The screen includes playback controls (they’re basically a simplified version of the ones you see on YouTube controls), an Actions button, and comment panel.
You can’t edit videos in as many ways as you can edit photos. But if you click the Edit button below one of your movies in lightbox view, you can rotate the clip right or left (in case you accidentally held the camera sideways while filming). Click the Options button to see details about it (statistics that are mainly of interest only to A/V geeks), or delete it. The box below explains a few other ways you can edit videos.
WORKAROUND WORKSHOP: TWEAKING VIDEOS WITH YOUTUBE
As noted above, Google+ doesn’t give you many options when it comes to editing videos. You can rotate them if they’re sideways, but that’s about it. Fortunately, you can easily make more elaborate changes by heading over to another site owned by Google: YouTube. Yup, YouTube offers decent, if basic, video-editing tools that are free to use.
Head over to YouTube.com and sign in with the same Google Account you