Share Your Files With Others

     Learn to share a FamilySearch "album" or collection of stories, photos, documents with others. You can easily share the items of LIVING people as well. It's easy to do.

     Find the item you would like to share. It could be a photo, document, story, or audio recording. Click on the "Share" link as seen in the image below. A dropdown list of share options appears. If you use Facebook, Twitters, or Pinterest to share items, choose one of these. More typically, you will either be Emailing OR Texting your family members.

     Clicking on the Email link will open up your email client, like Outlook, Apple Mail, or whatever app you use. If you work from inside a browser like with gmail, Yahoo, etc, this link will not work for you.

     The "Copy Link" option is often actually the easiest to use. By copying the link, you can paste it into EITHER a new email OR into a new text message, and send it off to your family.

     What happens on THEIR end? When they click on the link, the FamilySearch webpage you shared will open up. They will not even have to log into FamilySearch. Isn't that great? Your grandchildren will not even need an account to see what you have shared with them.

     There are many different businesses that will "rent" you space on their servers. Amazon Web Services has the largest server storage sites. Microsoft OneDrive, Apple iCloud, Google Drive, and Dropbox are some of the more common ones out there. Most of these services will offer a small amount of "free" storage space. Google is the most "giving" with its 15 gb storage capacity. This may sound like a lot, but actually it's a small amount. I personally have almost 43,000 images of my family over the years or about 300 gb of needed storage space.

     Cost can run from about $1 per month for about 200 gb, to $120/year for 2 terabytes. Just google "cloud drives", and you will be presented with a variety of different providers for these. It's quite easy to sign up and get started with a provider. Do your research first though to ensure that you are getting a good provider. The ones mentioned above are the most commonly used, but Box, iDrive, and others can also provide you good service. Just know that competition amongst all the host of providers is great, and often the smaller providers may get bought out, or just stop business.

     If you leave your house unlocked while you go shopping, you are not practicing good security habits. If you keep a mediocre password on your account, you will become a huge cybersecurity risk.

     Complex and long passwords ALONG with Two Factor Authentication will make your account “hacker proof”. Two Factor Authentication is nothing more than making sure you are the person you appear to be when you are logging into your account. The system will send you an email or a text message with a code that you need to additionally provide before being logged into the site with.

     One of the most important reasons to do so, is to have your data backed up and stored in an “off-site” location, just in case you have a house fire, flood, hard drive failure, or computer theft. Should one of these things happen to you, you can still easily access all of your files by logging into the server and re-downloading them onto your brand new computer.

     Another big reason to use cloud drives is that you can easily SHARE your files with your family relations by using a simple “link” that you send them in an email. That link contains the information they need to access the files that you are sharing with them. Most of the time, your link is for “view only” permissions, which means that they will not be able to edit, move, or delete your files, but only view them and download them.

     We often hear the question about "Can I upload family video clips to FamilySearch?" The answer is both YES and NO. Let me explain. FamilySearch does not allow you to upload the video clip directly into FamilySearch. However, the video clip can be stored on "cloud drives" such as Dropbox, YouTube, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, etc. You can create and copy a shared LINK to the file into a document, save the document to a PDF file which can then be uploaded to FamilySearch. It's probably easier to see an actual example than to describe one. Check out the one of me down below.

     There is a VERY IMPORTANT THING to consider before you start off doing this type of project. Links to files are easily broken. Let's say that you were using Google Drive to store the movie clip. The link that you copied to your PDF document on FamilySearch is to Google Drive. One day you decide that you no longer want to use Google Drive and move your movie clips to Dropbox. SUDDENLY, you have just broken the FamilySearch movie clip links. They will no longer work because they reference a nonexistent share link to Google Drive. This is NOT a good thing! (: Be sure that you continue to use the same cloud service for a long time. You may want to only upload certain very special clips, and just share the other movie clips with family using cloud drive links. If you move to a different cloud service, then it is only a matter of sending off a new link to all your videos.

     One VERY nice aspect about preserving movie clips in the way described below, is that you are also preserving who is in the movie clip. Screenshots of the people in the clip pasted into the word processing program allow you to name them. I have old movie film from the 1930s and had no idea who many of the folks were. My mother and we were able to travel together on an ocean cruise and during some of that time, I went through the old digitized movie films that were taken while she was growing up. We went through and identified each of the people in there, so that I could label them. Without her help, these old movie clips are simply old movie clips with nameless faces. I was able to extract a photo of my great grandfather from a couple of movie clips, photos that I did not have of him.

     Do NOT let those old movies sit and become useless because no one knows who they are of. Spend time asking your grandparents who these individuals are, and then create a way to ensure that those individuals in the movie live on for years to come.