How do I upload a video from my Apple iPhone to YouTube?

If you've been experimenting, I'm surprised you haven't tried to email a video to yourself and noticed the "Upload to YouTube" button immediately below the email option, but I'll let ya slide this time and show you how to do it.

First off, a suggestion: while you're on a regular computer, I suggest that if you don't have a YouTube account that you sign up for one. It'll make the upload process from your iPhone 3GS a ton easier. I mean, you could enter all the account information on your cell, but, really, do you want to suffer through field after field after field of data entry when you could probably do the entire process in just a minute or two on your laptop or desktop system? :-)

Here's the sign up link: Sign up to get an account on YouTube.

Great. Now, let's get to it!

I took an (I admit, extraordinarily boring) example video while working on this blog entry that's about ten seconds long. When I look at the video in the photo gallery on the iPhone, it looks like this:

What you want to do is tap on the box with the arrow coming out of it on the lower left corner. Now you'll see some options:

Really, you should have already seen this if you've been experimenting with different features on your phone, but I'll cut you some slack!

Tap on "Send to YouTube" and...

Here's where you want to know your YouTube account settings. Enter them and tap on "Sign In". Now YouTube wants you to enter a title, description, tags, and categorize the video.

We'll start with the first few fields, then continue:

Remember as you go through this that the better your description the more likely people will find it when they're searching YouTube for specific types of videos.

And tags are perhaps the most important one to be generous and label properly: better to have a few extra than to be too stingy...

When you're ready, tap on "Publish" on the top right and you'll rather suddenly be dropped back into your photo gallery without any additional feedback:

If you look closely, though, the "online activity wheel" is shown on the top left and sure enough, while you're wondering what's going on, the video is actually being uploaded to YouTube directly.

After a few moments (or longer), you'll see the following pop up:

I'm enthusiastic, so I'll tap "View on YouTube", which switches me to the YouTube player app on the Apple iPhone 3GS:

And, finally, when I can view the video, well, I'm moving a bit too fast, perhaps:

A little bit of time passes and finally, yes, I can view the video.

Here's an embedded copy:

As I said, it's pretty boring, but considering I took the video on my iPhone, uploaded it to YouTube and was able to share the URL with my friends, all within about three minutes, well, it's a pretty nice feature.

And now you know how to use it too!