I know how to share a video from my iPhone by copying it to my computer and then using the Web to upload the video and post it, but I’m wondering, is there a way I can post videos directly from my iPhone to Facebook, including adding comments and tagging the movie’s location?
There is indeed a way to upload videos you take directly from your Apple iPhone to your Facebook account, but unlike YouTube, the path to upload isn’t within the iPhone “Photos” application. Which, frankly, is confusing, because you can share photographs from within the Photos app to your Facebook account, so it’s not cleary about the disparity.
To get this to work, you’ll need to have the Facebook app for your iPhone. Without that, well, you’ll just be doing what you do now, copying the videos onto your computer then using your Web browser. Tedious and slow.
Once you have the app installed videotape something interesting.
For this demo, I’ll us a short video I made on my iPhone 5 in landscape mode. When I view the video in the Photos app, it looks like this:
Tap on the Share button (the box with the arrow coming out of it on the lower left) as you’d expect and here’s what shows up:
As I said earlier, I don’t really understand why there isn’t a “Facebook” icon as there is for photographs, but since there isn’t, your solution comes from the Facebook app. So launch the iPhone Facebook app and you’ll see something just like this:
Very nice and thanks for the updates, Suzanne and Trisha. 🙂
To post my video, I’ll tap on “Photo” on the top center and the app will show me everything in my Camera Roll, from newest to oldest:
Look closely and you’ll see that a few of the images have a small black bar along the bottom of their thumbnails, with a tiny white videocamera icon and a running-time indicator. The thumbnail on the third row, rightmost, for example, is 0:06.
Tap on the video you want to upload and you’ll be able to preview it:
Looks good? Ready to share with your friends?
Then tap on the blue “compose” icon on the lower right edge and you’ll be able to add comments, location, tag people, etc:
I’ll identify the location to help others find the video. To do that, I’ll tap on the fourth of the four icons just above the keyboard. From the left, they’re “Photo” (tap on it to detach the video), “People” to tag specific Facebook users in your video, “Mood” to specify your mood and “Location” pin. You’ll notice that mine has already geolocated to “Boulder” (Colorado), but I want to be more specific.
A tap on Location and a list of options show up:
I scroll down just a bit more to “Pearl Street Walking Mall”, add a few words, and it now looks like this:
Looks good! To upload the video and post it, choose standard or HD resolution lower on the screen, then tap on “Post” on the top right.
Now the video starts uploading:
While it’s uploading I can learn about Mia’s new shoes, post-sprained ankle. Very exciting. 🙂
After a while the video upload progresses:
And when it’s done you’ll receive a confirmation that it succeeded and will see it show up in your newsfeed:
There it is. If you want to now log in to your Web browser, it’s there in all its HD glory (if you chose an HD upload), ready for your friends to enjoy:
Nice. Not too bad once you know that you can upload photographs from your iPhone through the Photos app, but videos can only be uploaded from within the Facebook application. Got it? Great!