Using a link that arrived from somebody else

You are working with a copy of a copy

An address you copied from a page you were looking at is a known quantity. An address that reached you through one or more other people has been handled, and the handling is what determines whether it still works.

Three shapes account for nearly everything that arrives in a message: a plain address passed along, an address that has been shortened, and an address that exists only as pixels in a picture. Each one needs something different from you.

A plain address that was passed along

This is the straightforward case. The sender copied the address from the video and sent it, and it points where it pointed for them.

Two things travel with it that you did not choose. The address can carry the sender's tracking parameters, which the site ignores and you leave alone. It can also depend on the sender being signed in, in which case the page serves you a sign-in form and Analyze finds no video. Nothing about the text is wrong in that second case, and no amount of editing fixes it.

An address that has been shortened

A shortened address is a stand-in. The characters you were sent belong to the shortening service, and the service holds the real address and forwards anyone who follows it.

Forwarding is followed here, so a shortened address usually reaches the video and produces a normal list. It stops when the short address forwards to a landing page rather than to the video itself, which is common with marketing links and app-install pages. The signature is a list that comes back empty from an address that opens something in your browser. Open the short address, let it settle on the real page, and copy the address that ends up in the bar.

An address inside a screenshot

A picture of an address is not an address. There is nothing to copy out of an image, and pasting the image into the box gives the box nothing to read.

Screenshots also cut addresses off. A browser bar shows as much of an address as fits, and the identifier is at the end, which is the part that was on the far side of the crop. Even where the whole thing is visible, retyping it by hand is error-prone in exactly the place errors are fatal: one wrong character in an identifier names nothing.

What to ask the sender for

One request covers every awkward case, and it is worth sending rather than fighting the material you have.

Ask them to open the video, use the share or copy-link action, and paste the result as text. That produces the address of the item itself, complete to the last character, in a form you can select. It takes them a few seconds and removes the guessing at your end.

• Ask for text, not a picture of text.
• Ask for the address of the single video, not the page or profile they were browsing.
• Ask whether they were signed in to see it, because that answer explains an empty result before you go looking for another cause.

Getting the received address into the box cleanly

Messaging apps decorate addresses. A link can arrive wrapped in quotation marks, followed by a full stop, split across two lines, or attached to a preview card that copies the title instead of the address.

Select from the h of http to the last character and nothing else. If the paste brings a title or a stray bracket with it, remove those pieces and leave the address alone. Then press Analyze and read the list, which describes the video as the source publishes it rather than as anybody in the chain described it.

Related pages

• Sending someone the address against sending the file
• Links that arrive by email or inside a document
• Addresses that forward before they arrive
• Getting a pasted address into the box undamaged