How does dotPhoto video work? What about Family + Video Plans?

Modified on Tue, 25 Jan, 2022 at 10:37 PM

On 6/4/16, dotPhoto brought back short videos for Club and other Plan members.  If you have videos in an older account, they should play now. (Some older camera phone videos are very small.)

You can upload short videos up to 30MB with these file extensions: avi, mp4, m4v, mkv, mov, mpg, flv, 3gp, and 3g2.  Uploaded files are converted to mp4 files and stored; if you download your videos later, they will be mp4 files.

dotPhoto does not store long-format videos because people generally do not watch long personal videos, and because physical local storage is a more cost-effective solution for long-format videos.




How can I share a video?

Copy the URL in the browser and paste it into an email, Facebook, Twitter or wherever you want to share.


Sharing on Facebook

The video title and caption, which you can set inside an album under Organize / Edit Titles, appears in the preview.


How can I shrink a video to 30MB so it can be uploaded?

A number of free programs can shrink a file by (1) converting to a more compact file format or (2) changing the output quality to medium.

A free program called Format Factory can shrink large files in two ways.

FORMAT FACTORY FREE DOWNLOAD:      http://www.pcfreetime.com/

Works with many files but creates a flawed MP4 file;  choose AVI files for output.

HANDBRAKE   https://handbrake.fr/

Set to "Web Optimized" to compress output; or set to MP4 and reduce the width. Changing from 720 to 640 reduces file size by about 20% because it reduces the height proportionately.


HANDBRAKE FOR MAC AND UBUNTU   https://handbrake.fr/downloads.php

Set to "Web Optimized" to compress output; or set to MP4 and reduce the width.

FAMILY + VIDEO PLANS

dotPhoto once offered a membership plan called "Family + Video" that included short video storage. These plans have been "grandfathered" into the current plans: members with the Family + Video plan can keep the plan, but dotPhoto is not selling new plans.

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