Handling hundreds of client submitted videos/media

[Stephen Pickering]

Hi there,

We’re working on a project for graduating seniors and wanted to allow each student (potentially hundreds) to supply their own photo or video (it would just be one or the other. We thought about just asking everyone to submit the assets via wetransfer, asking them to simply change the file name it firstname_lastname.extension. They are students, so I *assume* they would understand file renaming…

The above sounds like it could become a mess, especially since we would not recognize each student and we’ll need to ensure we can match names with faces. I can ask for all of the information, but we know how requests can easily be overlooked ☺

Is there a platform (paid or fee) that is designed for or could be used for this purpose? Maybe it’s a WordPress plugin or app that would allow the individuals to create an account and upload the file(s) that could later be bulk downloaded? I guess I’m not certain what I am looking for, but I envision this being a need in the future. Maybe I’m overthinking this?

Thank you,

Stephen

[Mike Little]

Hi Stephen,

I posted with very similar issue not too long ago. The kind people of this forum provided some solutions and I came up with some myself. The one that was easiest was that most of my video submitters had iPhones. They shot their video and uploaded it to iCloud and sent me a link. For the Android users, uploading to Google Drive was very easy. My clips were typically under 2 minutes, so that worked very well as the file sizes were small. I also had users get to me via BOX.com. And, for my CEO, I added him as a user on Vimeo… His video was over 5 minutes (as you might imagine).

I also asked all of my submitters to introduce themselves as an added bonus in case I didn’t know who they were.

I will be following this thread very closely as I still don’t feel like I have the best answer… Just an answer, of sorts.

Good luck!
-Mike

[Stephen Pickering]

Hi Mike,

I appreciate you getting back to me. We think we’re onto a solution using Google Forms. We are still testing the idea, but it looks like it will work out perfectly for us. If it does work, I’ll share more. But basically, it’s a form that requires the user to be signed in using their Gmail account. The form has several options for uploads, including video (with a size limit) and images. These get uploaded to our Google Drive folder and Forms automatically adds the uploader’s name to the file name (which can later be rearranged as needed using “Bulk Rename Utility”). The form sends all form data to a Google Sheet that we can then identify (automatically) which users have submitted files (and which of the options they submitted) as well as which have not replied.

There are still some hiccups we’re working out, but learning about Google Forms has been a lot of fun, and when we’re done I think this will be an absolutely perfect solution… but we’ll see!

Thank you again,
-Stephen

[Mark Suszko]

For a multiscreen music video project, what I’ve been doing is creating a dedicated facebook group, the members upload videos there in a discussion thread, and I can right click and pull those down locally whenever I want… but I’m only handling maybe 30 contributors, not an entire graduating class.

[Stephen Pickering]

That’s a great idea, Mark. I never thought about Facebook and didn’t realize it was that easy to download from.

I haven’t finished the Google form yet and was disappointed to find that it’s not quite as secure as I hoped if not within the domain of the receivers (ie, the school district), so it’s an extra hoop for the district to publish the form, but I think it’s going to work out. I’ll let you know!