Trimming videos in your Story Maps

Sometimes you have a video you’d like to include in a story map, but it’s too long (snoozer!) or only a portion of the video is applicable to your story. No problem—you can easily trim videos from YouTube or Vimeo to define the start and stop times.

Read on to find out how…

Video hosting sites support URL parameters that let you customize the behavior of their video players. Here are the URL parameters that let you trim videos.

YouTube

• Supports both start and end times
• Format: &start=90, &start=30&end=180, &end=245 (times in seconds)
• Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZfuNTqbHE8&start=30&end=60

TIP: Make sure the URL you use follows the example above. There are a few forms of URLs that you can grab from YouTube (for example, the link should not have /embed/ in it.

Vimeo

• Supports only start time
• Format: #t=30s
• Example: https://vimeo.com/52246291#t=30s

Adding trimmed videos in story map builders

In Cascade, you can include URL parameters on the end of a video link when adding it to the Link to Content tab of the media picker. As of the June 2018 update, these parameters will be honored.

In Journal and Series, you can add a video link with URL parameters as Web Page content (instead of as a Video).

That’s it! When the video appears in your story you’ll see the video player indicate that the video has been trimmed. For example, the YouTube player adds small tick marks at the specified start/end times.

Intro photo by Frank Okay on Unsplash. Movie trailer via YouTube.