Google’s New ‘YouTube Capture’ iPhone App Simplifies Video Sharing

On Monday, just in time for the holidays, Google released a brand new app that makes publicly embarrassing friends and family easier than ever.

YouTube Capture is a free video-recording app for iPhone and iPod touch. (Oddly, it is not available for Google’s Android mobile OS). The new app lets you record video of your friends and quickly share it on YouTube, Google+, Facebook and Twitter, all in one fell swoop. Won’t that make you popular? Private sharing options are available, but they are not nearly as much fun.

When you first launch YouTube Capture, you can enable “Color correction” and “Stabilize” features and save all your videos to your Camera Roll. After shooting a new video you can trim it by dragging the edges of its border around the clip’s thumbnail.

You can also add prerecorded music, but for whatever reason the music won’t play on my iPhone 5 after I add it to a video and then preview the clip. I have to listen to it with headphones even though my iPhone’s speaker works perfectly.

Another cool feature: You can rotate your iPhone or iPod touch to start recording a video. I also like the ability to color correct, stabilize, trim and upload videos already on my iPhone. Uploading happens in the background, so you can go back to recording. Even if you close the app, it will continue uploading for up to 10 minutes, according to Google.

Unfortunately, YouTube Capture doesn’t let you tie written descriptions to your videos, which is important in helping others find them through search or compelling them to watch. I probably wouldn’t want to type all that on my iPhone keyboard anyway, though, and you can write descriptions and perform other video-management tasks on the full YouTube site.

YouTube Capture isn’t the first iPhone app that lets you upload videos directly to YouTube. Apple’s iMovie ($5) and Camera Plus Pro ($1) by Global Delight Technologies both provide more editing tools and let you share videos on YouTube and other social networks. But if all you want is a free, simple YouTube onramp that lets you amp up the fun at a holiday party, Google’s YouTube Capture will do the trick.