Home videos

A place for the household's own recordings: birthdays, holidays, old tapes, the dog's first day. They're kept apart from your films, television and music. You can tag who and what is in them, and browse by person or by year.

In short. Everyone signed in can watch home videos, except child accounts. Only a curator can add or change them. They never appear on the home screen, and searching your films never finds them.

Switching them on

Turn on the section

In a browser, go to Settings → Server → Home Videos and tick Keep home videos on this server. A curator can do this. Home Videos then appears in the sidebar for everyone who can watch.
Add a home videos folder

In Settings → Library Folders → Add a Folder, choose Home videos as the kind, then choose the folder with Browse, or make a new one there with New Folder. The administrator adds folders. The kind is offered only once the section is switched on.
Put some videos in it

Upload them from a browser, or copy them into the folder and run a scan. Both are described below.

Turning home videos off hides the section and everything in it. Nothing is deleted. Turn it back on and it all comes back exactly as it was.

Adding videos

Uploading

Uploading is the best way in. It's the moment you know what a clip is. Open Uploads, choose Home Video and pick your files. Before anything is sent, a list shows each file with a title and a date. The title starts as the file name. Leave a date empty and the server uses the date the camera wrote into the file, if there is one.

The server files each video for you in a tree, by year, date and title:

Home videos/
  1994/
    1994-12-25 Christmas morning.mp4
  Undated/
    Grandad's allotment.mp4

So even without the server, your folder still reads as a family archive. When an upload finishes, it tells you which date the video ended up with, or that it went under Undated.

Scanning

Videos you copy into the folder yourself are found by the library scan: Settings → Library Maintenance → Library Scan, or a scheduled scan. A scheduled scan waits until a file has finished copying. The title comes from the file name. A date at the start of the name is taken as the date, not as part of the title. Underscores and hyphens become spaces.

A scan only adds. It never moves, renames or deletes a file. A video whose file has gone missing keeps its title, date and tags, so a drive that is briefly unplugged costs you nothing. A video you've moved to the Trash isn't brought back by a scan. Files with no video in them are left alone and skipped.

Most video formats are accepted, including camcorder and DVD formats such as DV, MPEG-2, AVCHD, .m2ts and .vob.

How the recording date is worked out

Home videos are browsed by when they were recorded. The server works the date out in this order and uses the first it finds:

A date you type, on upload or later.
A date at the start of the file name, such as 1994-12-25 Christmas morning. Underscores or dots work in place of hyphens. It must be a real date; a year on its own isn't enough.
The date written inside the file by the phone or camera that recorded it.

The file's "modified" date is never used. Copying a file resets it, so a tape transferred last week would claim to be from last week. With no date at all, a video is filed under Undated and shown as No date until somebody sets one. Tape transfers usually land there.

A date that came from the file, not from a person, is marked (from the file) on the video's card, so you can tell a guess from a known date.

Tags: people, pets, occasions and places

Tags say who and what a video is about. Each tag has a kind: Person, Pet, Event, Place or Other. A video can have as many as it needs.

Creating a tag

Create tags as you go, while tagging a video. Or create them in advance from Home Videos → Tags → + New Tag, which asks for a name and then what kind of thing it is. Names ignore capitals, so mum and Mum are the same tag. An event and a place can share a name, because they're different kinds.

A picture for each tag

On the Tags page, open a tag's ⋯ menu and choose Set Picture…. Any tag can have one, not just people: a house, a car or a caravan is worth recognising too. The same menu has Rename…, Change Kind… and Remove Picture.

Renaming a tag onto a name that's already taken is refused, and the message names the tag in the way. Two tags are never merged by accident.

Tagging a video

Open the ⋯ menu on a video's card and choose Add Tag…. A picker shows the tags already in use, ticked where they're already on this video. Click one to add or remove it straight away. The picker stays open for the next. Type to filter. Type a new name, choose its kind, and it is created and added in one go.

Deleting a tag

Before a tag is deleted, you're told how many videos carry it and which ones. Only the label goes; the videos are untouched.

Browsing

Home Videos has four pages in the sidebar.

Friends and Family leads with faces: everyone tagged as a person, then pets. Choose a face to see their videos. Places, events and other tags sit as a quieter row beneath.
Over the Years leads with a timeline, decades first. Open a decade to see the years in it that have something. No date sits at the end. The people are underneath, so you can ask for "Mum, in 2003".
Collections holds named groups of videos.
Tags is where the tags themselves are looked after.

Both browsing pages have their own search box. It finds titles and what you wrote under What was happening. It searches home videos only.

Newly added videos carry a New pill on their card for a month, or until a curator clears the marks under Settings → Library Maintenance → New Arrivals. It appears only here, inside Home Videos, and never puts a video on the home screen.

On iPhone, both ways of browsing share one screen, with faces first; it's reached from a button on the home screen. On iPad, home videos have their own place in the sidebar. The apps browse and play home videos; changes are made in a browser.

Changing a video

Each video's card has a ⋯ menu for curators, wherever the card appears.

Fix Metadata… opens the editor: the title, When it was recorded, What was happening, and its tags. Clear the date to make a video undated again.
Add Tag… opens the tag picker described above.
Add to Collection… opens a picker of your collections, which works the same way.
Set Poster Frame… chooses the picture on the card. The player opens with a bar beneath it. Move to the moment you want and choose Use This Frame. To begin with, the server picks a frame about a tenth of the way in, skipping any that are almost blank, to get past the lens cap and the "is it on?".
Delete… moves the video to the Trash.

Saving changes in the editor renames and moves the file to match: 1994/1994-12-25 Christmas morning.mp4. Correcting a date moves the file between year folders, and the editor tells you where it went.

Collections and banners

Make a collection from Home Videos → Collections → + New Collection, then add videos to it from their cards. A collection's card shows its banner, or a few of the posters inside it if it has none. Its ⋯ menu sets or removes the banner, renames it, or removes it. Removing a collection removes only the collection. The videos stay.

Friends and Family and Over the Years can each have a banner of their own. Hover over the top of the page and use the ⋯ in the corner to add, change or remove it.

Who can watch, and who can change them

Watching: everyone signed in, except child accounts, who don't see the section at all. Nobody outside your house has rated these videos, and unrated is never shown to a child.
Adding and changing: curators and the administrator. Changing a home video changes it for the whole household.

Kept apart from everything else

Home videos never appear on the home screen or in its rows. They don't appear in Continue Watching, favourites or your watch list. Your films' collections and the main search never include them. A clip of a family Christmas shouldn't turn up on a shared screen when someone searches for a film.

Videos that won't play

Old camcorder and DVD footage sometimes uses a format a browser or device can't play. Nothing is refused for that. The video is added and its card says Will not play, with the reason. Convert the file with a video tool, then replace it.

Deleting

Deleting a home video moves it to the Trash, with its title, date and tags. A curator can put it back from there, and it returns to the collections it was in. It's only gone for good once the Trash is emptied.

The files are irreplaceable, so keep a backup of your home videos folder. Titles and dates live in the file names, so a scan can take the tree back in after a disaster. Tags, collections and chosen poster frames are kept only by the server.

All documentation · Next: Accounts, people and Kids Mode