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Sharing moments publicly

Moment sharing lets you turn any named video clip into a public link that anyone can open in a browser — no Alcoves account, no library membership, no login required. Paste the link into Slack, iMessage, Discord, or X and it unfurls into a video card. Open it in a browser and it plays inline.

Everything else in Alcoves requires authentication. Public sharing is the single deliberate exception — scoped tightly to one exported clip per link, gated behind a library-level toggle that only an owner or admin can enable.

Prerequisites

Section titled “Prerequisites”

Before a share link can exist, two things must be true:

  1. Sharing must be enabled on the library. It is off by default. A library owner or admin enables it in Library Settings → Sharing. Until it is on, the Share button in the video editor is disabled for everyone in that library.
  2. The moment must be exported. A moment is a named time-range clip you mark in the video editor. Before it can be shared, you need to export it — Alcoves transcodes the clip to MP4 in the background. You can trigger the export from the moment edit form.
Section titled “Creating a share link”
  1. Open the video editor for a file that has at least one moment.
  2. Select the moment you want to share and open its edit form.
  3. Click the Share button in the form header. If the clip has not been exported yet, do that first — the Share button will tell you.
  4. In the Share modal, click Create link. Alcoves generates a unique URL of the form https://your-instance/s/<token>.
  5. Copy the URL and share it however you like.

The share link appears immediately in the modal alongside any other active links for that moment. You can create multiple links for the same moment — each is independent and can be revoked separately.

What the recipient sees

Section titled “What the recipient sees”

Anyone who opens the link lands on a standalone video player page. There is no Alcoves header, sidebar, or login prompt — just a dark-themed player with the moment’s title, the exported clip, and a link back to the library for authenticated users.

If the clip is still being transcoded when someone opens the link, they see a “Still processing” placeholder. The page does not auto-refresh — they can reload once the export finishes.

Pasting the link into a messaging app produces a rich video card: thumbnail, title, and an inline or linked player, powered by Open Graph and Twitter Player metadata embedded in the page.

Section titled “Revoking a link”

Open the Share modal for the moment and click Revoke next to any active link. The token stops working immediately — the link returns “not found” to anyone who tries to open it, with no indication of whether it ever existed.

Revoking is permanent for that token. If you want to share the moment again, create a new link — it will have a fresh, unguessable URL.

What changes when you edit a moment

Section titled “What changes when you edit a moment”

If you adjust the start or end time of a moment and export it again, the new version replaces the old one. Any existing share links continue to work — they serve the latest successfully exported version of the clip automatically. There is no need to create new links after a re-export.

Enabling and disabling sharing for a library

Section titled “Enabling and disabling sharing for a library”

Library owners and admins control sharing at the library level from Library Settings → Sharing.

  • Enabling sharing makes the Create link button active for all members with write access.
  • Disabling sharing does not revoke existing links. Links that were already created remain active until individually revoked. Disabling prevents new links from being created.

If you want to stop all sharing immediately, revoke each link individually from the Share modal for each moment.

Security model

Section titled “Security model”
PropertyDetail
Opt-inSharing must be explicitly enabled per library; off by default
Token strength192 bits of randomness, URL-safe encoded — effectively unguessable
What the token exposesExactly one moment’s exported clip and its thumbnail — nothing else
RevocationInstant; revoked tokens return 404 with no distinguishing error
No token oracleA revoked or never-issued token returns the same “not found” response — you cannot tell whether a token ever existed
Thumbnail served directlyThe thumbnail is served without redirecting through the authenticated image proxy, so Open Graph crawlers can fetch it without credentials
Section titled “Related features”