Why Move Your Home

Movies/Videos to the Cloud

Getting your home movies uploaded to the cloud is one of the most
rewarding tasks you can undertake in organizing your family's memories.

This summary blog tells you why it's great, what the shortcomings are, and
how Collectionaire addresses these shortfalls and takes advantage of
advanced features to give you a better experience.
So Why Should I Do This?

For those new to the cloud, we’ll first explain that “in the cloud” simply
means your movies are not stored on your computer drive or a DVD but
on a computer in an offsite location, managed by a major company like
Amazon, Microsoft, Box, Dropbox, Apple, Google or others. They also
store copies in other facilities as backup protection for your files.
First Benefit: Streaming

Once uploaded, you'll simply click on a movie to stream it directly to your

connected device, just like a movie streamed to your television or mobile device
on Netflix today (i.e., you don’t need to download the movie to view it).

Below is a sample of a digitized 8mm home movie, 1968 Trip to California and
Disneyland, uploaded to Google Drive. Clicking on the image will open a new
tab in your browser, presenting the movie in Google Drive.
Second Benefit: Sharing

Movies in the cloud are also easy to share with others. Most all sites allow you to pull a
"share link" from the file. When this link is sent to others by email, for example, they are
able click on it and bypass login credentials to stream your movie without gaining
access to other files in your cloud account.

Here's what getting a share link looks like on Amazon Drive...

Third Benefit: Backup

Perhaps it goes without saying that having your movies in the cloud provides yet
one more backup of your files. The difference is that cloud sites were once used
only for backup. Today the cloud is often a better way to view and share your
photos and videos, while computers, thumb drives, and hard drives are more
frequently becoming the backup.
OK... cloud streaming, sharing, and storing
are great. So what are the shortcomings?
First problem: It can be hard to find the movie

Once in the cloud with all your other files and folders, it can be difficult to find the
movie you're looking for (“did I put that in the movies folder or my parents'
folder?”). And then, once you remember, it's three clicks to start diving deep into
the nested folders...
Second problem: No description of your movie

Once you find your movie folder and click again, in most cases you'll see
only file names and random preview images to identify your movies. With
few exceptions, there are no descriptions.
Third problem: Thumbnail images are random

If this were a digital photo album you would often be able to choose the
preview image. But for videos (other than YouTube and a few others) it's
randomly pulled from the movie and what you see may not be a good
representation.

For example, the nice Disneyland castle photo shown above is not the
preview image assigned automatically by Google Drive for that movie. The
actual image is this one:
Fourth problem: Always starting playback at the beginning

When you click on a movie in its stored location, it starts playing from the
beginning. But a major feature of movies/videos stored in Vimeo, Google Drive,
or YouTube is that if you use a "share link" to access the movie, you can add a
time mark to the link. This prompts the video to start at a specific moment or
scene.

This is especially useful for long-form movies and videos which may have
multiple events on the same movie or tape. But, again, this feature is only usable
if the video is viewed via a share link.
How it’s Done In Collectionaire

Collectionaire was designed to maintain the great features

of cloud use noted above, but address and solve the
shortcomings, allowing users to:
- organize home movies to be quickly found,
- add searchable descriptions,
- add perfect thumbnail images, and
- start movies at specific scenes

So here’s how our Trip to California movie is organized

and presented in Collectionaire:
First benefit: Direct access vs. Nested folders

First, knowing that the California trip was one of the James and Patricia Kinsey
family's vacations, you'll access their "family collection" by clicking on the link
icon between them in their family tree. This effectively bypasses what would
have been two or three levels of nested folders.
Then on their family collection page, their "Best Family Vacations" chapter is
quickly found...
Second benefit: Add a title and full
description

Opening this Vacations chapter you'll

see a list of their home movies - with
titles, preview images and
descriptions. Clicking any of the
preview images opens a new tab in
your browser and takes you to that
movie in the cloud site where it
resides.
If the description entered is longer than
can be seen in its description box, clicking
in the box prompts a pop-up with the full
description. In this case, details of the
movie and scenes.
Third benefit: Add a custom thumbnail image

If we want to replace the preview image generated by the cloud site, we can
quickly take a screen grab of a scene in the movie and upload the image as
the new preview image.
Fourth benefit: Start at a specific scene

When a photo, photo album, document or video

is added to Collectionaire, we add four items:
Name, Description, Share Link and Preview
Image. Again, the "share link" links you to your
file in another cloud site.

So because Collectionaire's system is built on

these links, if we're using Google Drive, Vimeo,
or YouTube we can add a custom time mark to
the end of the link to start the playback at a
specific scene.
Below we've added different start points to
the same 1968 California trip, breaking it
into 5 sections connecting you directly to
that part of the movie, without having to do
any edits or add detailed descriptions to find
key scenes.
Another use case for a specific start point was presented here a few months
ago in an earlier blog post. In this case, we profiled a link to a video clip of a
child getting her only first place award in her 8-year dance career. This
allowed that clip to be directly accessed in her collection page without
asking the viewer to scrub forward to view it.
Finally, a Couple of Additional Features

- Search: A search icon resides at the top right of every page, and entering a
term (e.g. a person's name or a place) brings up every item in your entire
collection where that term was entered into the item's title or description.
(See Searching Your Collection in the Help topics)

- Copy and Paste: You may have photo albums or movies that fit into more
than one collection... e.g., the birth of a child could be added to both the
family collection and the child's collection. With copy and paste, the movie
is stored just once in your 3rd party cloud site but quickly entered twice in
Collectionaire.
Well... we hope you found this interesting as to what you can do with your
videos in the cloud, both with and without Collectionaire.

For Information visit us at www.collectionaire.com