Sheryl Plouffe shows how to save videos from Google Drive and Wistia to your phone's camera roll, then upload them to Instagram. Watch out: 16:9 videos get cropped to Instagram's square format and may cut off important content. Use Kapwing to reformat to square first.
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Wendy is a client of mine and she asked a great question today. My name is Sheryl Plouffe. I'm a video strategist and I want to walk you through the answer to her question, which was, how do I publish a video to Instagram that is stored on a cloud storage device like Google Drive, as an example? So this is how I would do it. I'm mirroring my phone onto the screen. You can see Wendy's beautiful face there in the first opening shot of her video. So when you are on your phone, if you have downloaded the Google Drive app to your phone, you'll open up the Google Drive and find the video in question, the video that you would like to then publish to Instagram. This is the video in question in this case. So what you'll do is you'll look for the, the three little dots on the top right-hand side, and when you click those three little dots, you'll see a bunch of different options. In order to save it to your phone, you'll want to hit on Send a Copy. I know it doesn't sound like that would work, but hit Send a Copy and you'll have an option here to Save Video. So once you click Save Video, it's going to say downloading. It actually says preparing to export, downloading. In this case, iMakeup3 is the name of the video file, .mp4, and there is a I think it was thinking, and it's going through that process. So you just wait, and you have to be patient. So once that downloads onto your phone, you're ready to take the next step. If the video that you want to publish to Instagram is saved in Wistia, for example, then you would— same thing— you would open the app for Wistia in this case, this one. And, you know, we can see a whole bunch of videos coming up here from Nicole. And again, you would just substitute your video that you're looking for. In this case, I'll use the Win a Trip to Mexico as an example. So I would export that video. So I open it up in Wistia, but I'm gonna hit the export button this time. Once I do that, I see the save video button. I click that. The popup box looks a little bit different. But it's doing the same thing. It's exporting and downloading your video from this app onto your camera roll. And that's what you want to do. Once the video in question is on your camera roll, whether you do it this way through Wistia or you did it through the Google Drive app, you are going to then have it on your camera roll. And it's the same principle as would apply to anything you'd want to post on Instagram. So then you would go over to the Instagram App, and you would open that up and you would hit the plus button at the bottom, and then you would choose the video in question. Let's say it's, you know, this one, for example, and then you'll hit next and you'll go through that whole process as you normally would. So nothing is really all that different. But what you want to be mindful of is— let me just pause this here— is that this video, because this was saved in a 16:9 format. You can see it here when I— here, I'll show you. This all looks great in the middle because it was centered, but look at the name banner for Nicole. It's cut off. Do you see that? Because this video was produced in a 16:9 format where the format for Instagram is square. So that's the only consideration that you have to keep in mind. It depends on the, on on the actual content itself. It might be okay. It might be okay to just take it as it is and publish it to Instagram. If you find that it's a problem based on the content that you're doing, what you might want to do is consider changing the aspect ratio of that particular video to a square format. And the tool that I would recommend to do that would be Kapwing, K-A-P-W-I-N-G. Kapwing is a tool that I've I've fallen in love with, frankly, because it allows you to change the aspect ratio and repurpose a lot of this content. That would be a video for another time to show you that process. If that's of interest, by all means leave a comment and say, "Yes, Cheryl, I'd like to know the next step," and I'm happy to do a tutorial on that as well. So I hope that's helpful for you. That, in my opinion, is the easiest way to get a video from a Google Drive or from a Wistia account saved onto your camera roll so that you can upload it to your Instagram feed. If you have any questions, please contact me. I am @cherylplouffe pretty much everywhere on social media, and you can also visit me at cherylplouffe.com and register for my free 7-day video challenge if you're interested. Thanks so much. Have a great day.
