Share a clip as a time-limited link

Use this procedure when you need to send an event clip to a colleague, law enforcement officer, insurance adjuster, or anyone else who does not have a NovaVMS account. You generate a link; they click it and watch the clip in their browser.

Caution

Anyone with the link can watch the clip until it expires. The link does not check who is clicking it. Treat sharing a link as the same as handing someone a copy of the footage — do not share clips from sensitive areas, staff-only zones, or anywhere containing identifiable faces of non-involved people without internal approval.

Procedure

1. Open the Events page.
2. Click the event whose clip you want to share.
3. On the event detail page, click Share.
4. Choose how long the link stays active: 1 hour, 24 hours, 7 days (default), or 30 days.
5. Click Create link.
6. Click Copy link.
7. Paste the link into your email, chat, or ticket.

The recipient sees a page with the camera name, timestamp, AI description, and a player with play, pause, scrub, speed, and fullscreen controls. The Share dialog has an Allow download toggle (frontend/src/components/ShareDialog.tsx:165) which defaults to ON (ShareDialog.tsx:60) and is forwarded to POST /api/v1/events/{eventId}/shares as the allow_download field (ShareDialog.tsx:77). When download is allowed, the shared page shows a download button alongside the player; when disabled, recipients can only stream in-browser.

What is logged

Every share writes a row to the per-share access log: who created it, expiry, and the link token (action share_created). Each time a recipient opens the link, a viewed row is appended with the recipient’s IP address and User-Agent. Admins can call GET /api/v1/events/{eventId}/shares/{shareId}/audit to retrieve the log; the central Audit log actions page records share-management actions at the org level.

Common variations

• Change expiry after creation: you cannot. Revoke the existing link and create a new one.
• Revoke a link early: supported. Open the event’s Shares list and click Revoke next to the share, or call DELETE /api/v1/events/{eventId}/shares/{shareId}. The link starts returning 410 Gone immediately; recipients who already loaded the page can finish their current playback but new fetches against the token fail.

If this didn’t work

• If Share is missing from the toolbar, the event’s clip did not finish uploading. Wait for the clip player to load, then refresh the event page.
• If the recipient sees “This link has expired,” create a new link with a longer expiry.

Related

• Export a clip as evidence — use this instead when you need a tamper-evident MP4 file, not a link.
• Audit log actions — what share events look like in the log.