Web video creators have been frustrated and confused by the inability to upload videos from Google+ to YouTube. But YouTube just announced a new feature to address this issue.
Google bought YouTube in 2006. In 2011, Google integrated its social networking service, Google+, with YouTube, but not completely, which confused those users of Google+ who also use YouTube. Users were able to watch YouTube videos on Google+, but were not able to import videos from Google+ accounts to YouTube accounts.
Google further integrated the two services in 2013, requiring all YouTube users to have a Google+ account, because the YouTube commenting system is now very much Google+ oriented. Yet still, with the two services very intertwined, videos that had been added to a user’s Google+ account couldn’t be imported to that user’s YouTube account.
But on Tuesday, August 26, YouTube announced that this feature has finally arrived. In Google’s YouTube forum, a staffer announced:
“We have launched a new feature that will allow you to import videos from Google+ Photos.
If you are a regular Google+ user and have uploaded plenty of videos to share with your circles, or if you have Google+ Photos Auto backup on your mobile device, you will be able to import all these videos to YouTube.
This way you can easily store those videos on YouTube, share it with your fans and keep uploading awesome content in your channel.”
If you have a YouTube account, you will see that the new feature is already live on YouTube. On the normal YouTube video upload page, a new option now appears with the Google+ logo that says, “Import Videos.” Clicking this option will bring up videos currently residing on your Google+, assuming you have uploaded videos to Google+. Then, you simply select which video you want to import to your YouTube channel. You can also bulk upload if you’ve got a lot of content to move over to your YouTube channel. All the normal options are still presented to you for each video, like tags, descriptions and permissions.
Check out this video from YouTube explaining just how easy it is to import videos from Google+ to YouTube.
