Flickr Over YouTube For Video

I just decided that even though I wrote about this already in a previous post, I had to vent a bit more as I find myself sitting here almost 2 months later and Flickr has finally released their video service.

It is really frustrating to me that Google has yet to follow through with an improvement on their private video groups. When you can define the friends in a group and even have another group such as family, why is it that you have to constantly choose who you share a video with if it is private? What is wrong with choosing an entire group in one step?

Could it be the 25 person limit on a private video? If that is the case, why not implement a group called private on youtube and just add all the people that are allowed to watch your private videos and put a cap on that group for 25 users? Without group privacy settings, it is a nightmare. Let me explain why.

I have a video that I uploaded 2 years ago and I currently have most family members as YouTube members to share the video. Disappointing though, I couldn’t convince my father to join YouTube to watch the video in that 2 year period. Now, he wants to view that video and all my other private videos I have on the service. Right now, I can’t add my father to a “group” and grant him access on all my private videos. Oh no.

Instead, I have to go through the 150 private videos one at a time and add him to the list of the 25 people that can view the video. That means that he is also going to get 150 emails saying that I have a video to share. On top of that, the other members who can view that video also get 150 emails as the system doesn’t seem to remember who could watch it previously. That is completely unacceptable.

Let me say that again. It is completely unacceptable.

If Google has a grand scheme to limit the private videos on their service and not make it the service of choice for said videos, then they finally have convinced me. I will not get rid of the private videos that I have on the service, but I will no longer be adding any new videos that are private. I have moved my videos over to Flickr where it seems they are happy that you have private content.

YouTube will still be a place where I will be uploading videos. The problem with the Flickr video service is that they stop you cold at 90 seconds and that doesn’t work for all videos. That means, I have to either put longer videos on my own service or continue to upload them to YouTube. I choose the latter for now.

I am not saying that if YouTube ever changes their privacy settings to make it easier that I won’t use them, but I am not really that happy. I have been a member for almost 3 years and the ability to add private videos and administer them is getting worse, not better. In the beginning it worked better with the groups. Now it sucks. I am sticking with Flickr.