Would you like to see enhanced privacy options?

Jason Dunn · September 12, 2007

I posted this in the Smugmug feature requests thread, but perhaps because that thread is so long I don't see much discussion occuring around the features that users propose - I think any feature being proposed would benefit from community input, so I'm posting it here in hopes of generating some discussion and ideas/feedback.

********

I know this has been requested in one form or another many times over the years but I'll request it again: I'd like to see more granularity in the Smugmug approach to album privacy and security. Right now Smugmug is great for two things: completely public albums where any random user can see every picture, or completely secure albums where only someone with the password can see any of the images. The current method is too binary (secure or not secure) and is fraught with difficulties and frustrations for me as a Smugmug user.

So I have one specific feature request:

I want to have the ability to flag certain photos within a gallery as private, using an easy and fast batch-mode "click to make private" function. The rationale here is that if there are pictures as part of a gallery that I'd like only friends/family to see (usually the ones where people are acting goofy or slightly embarrassing), I don't want random people to be able to see those images - but I don't mind them looking through all of the other images in the gallery. If friends and family come visit the gallery and enter the password, it "unlocks" all the other images for them, so they can see and order every photo. It's the best of both worlds!

SmugIslands is a great step forward for those people who are concerned about hiding their images from search engines, but SmugIslands doesn't deal with the human factor and all of the issues I raised. I don't mind my images being discovered by Google and other search engines, but I'd love to have the ability to have a single album that would contain all of the photos I want friends and family to see, yet still have the more generic, non-personal photos I don't mind the world seeing. The only workaround right now is to have two galleries, one public and one hidden, then delete the personal photos from the public gallery. That's an ugly hack and wastes Smugmug storage space and resources.

EDIT: I should explain that when I say to "flag certain photos within a gallery as private", I don't mean each picture would have a different password. There would be one password for the whole album, something that when entered would unlock and display all of the previously hidden images.

Jason Dunn · September 12, 2007

As a follow up to this post, I wanted to add that a couple of night ago I finished uploading a new album, and the only way to achieve what I want with Smugmug's current system is to upload two copies of the same photos. I have a private album (hidden URL, not password protected) with all 409 of my original images, which was a 1.08 GB upload. That's the album I emailed out to my friends and family. Then I made a public album, uploaded all 409 of them again (another 1.08 GB upload - yikes!) then went through and deleted the 22 images I didn't want the world to see.

This process took a very long time (uploading 2.16 GB with a 1 mbps upstream), and I'm faced with the problem now of having to decide which of the albums I want to post my photo comments on, because doing them for both albums would be brutal.

Does anyone else jump through similar hoops?

Andy · September 12, 2007

Jason Dunn wrote:

I posted this in the Smugmug feature requests thread, but perhaps because that thread is so long I don't see much discussion occuring around the features that users propose

All of us at SmugMug follow that thread. It's a long thread because our customers like to tell us what to do

And I try to summarize every so often the FRs that have been implemented, as you can see from the first post in each FR thread.

Thanks for posting, I'll make sure our team sees this, too

marlof · September 12, 2007

Jason Dunn wrote:

Does anyone else jump through similar hoops?

Jason Dunn. Jason Dunn. The name rings a bell...

I use Lightroom to create the JPEGs for upload.

One setting I named Smugmug800, it creates 800x600 files of the images I don't mind the world to see, and it places these in a directory called images\upload\name of gallery.

One setting I named SmugmugFull, it creates full size files of images I want to share with family and friends only (and don't mind them to download etc), and it places these in a directory called images\upload\private\name of gallery.

Then I run two instances of Send To Smugmug, sending these two directories to smugmug in my absense (creating galleries, and setting rights/passwords/the works, all at the same time). It works for me, especially since I generally don't want the world to download full size images.

I only caption the public folders.

Wildearth · September 12, 2007

Nested Galleries
I like the idea of having more flexibility in this way, but am not sure individual photo passwords are the solution. It could get unwieldly to manage, both from the standpoint of the member and of the user. How about this as another idea that could solve the same problem while creating additional opportunities for members?

Make galleries nestable. That is, let me make gallery A and gallery B as different galleries. They show on my home page as individual galleries. But then let me nest gallery B inside gallery A. If a visitor clicks on B, she sees B, but if she clicks on A then she sees A + B. If the B photos are password protected, then an icon shows (perhaps with the words 'password protected') instead of a thumbnail, but no one has to enter a password unless they click on one of the B icons. If someone enters the correct password once, then all thumbnails become active.

Not only would that solve Jason's problem (and I imagine most of us would enjoy the extra flexibility), but it would also allow members to be much more creative in the designing of their sites.

Baldy · September 13, 2007

Jason Dunn wrote:

I want to have the ability to flag certain photos within a gallery as private, using an easy and fast batch-mode "click to make private" function.

Hey Jason,

I love that you're thinking of ways to improve SmugMug and willing to fight for them. Unfortunately, I have a couple of pieces of bad news that I hate giving...

The first is it would be a lot of work because of the way our architecture is laid out.

The second is SmugIslands was a long, hard, expensive grind that had us chasing performance issues for months after. I know it was really important to a few customers (whom we love, Papajay!) but we delayed some really important stuff for it that was wanted by a lot of customers.

ChrisG · September 13, 2007

As a Smugmug user I'd like to see that also. For example. A few months back I had a cousin in town with her daughter for my sisters wedding. We went to the zoo the morning of and I took a bunch of great pictures. The cousin preferred that I not post pictures of her daughter on-line in a public area, so I ended up making the whole set private rather than just those with them in it. I'd certainly like more granularity.

dmc · September 13, 2007

Baldy wrote:

Hey Jason,

I love that you're thinking of ways to improve SmugMug and willing to fight for them. Unfortunately, I have a couple of pieces of bad news that I hate giving...

The first is it would be a lot of work because of the way our architecture is laid out.

The second is SmugIslands was a long, hard, expensive grind that had us chasing performance issues for months after. I know it was really important to a few customers (whom we love, Papajay!) but we delayed some really important stuff for it that was wanted by a lot of customers.

assuming you are considering a "virtual galleries" feature, then the "virtual gallery" should act just like a real gallery (i.e.has its own category, description, security features, options, etc) ....

detailed security masks could then be handled via virtual galleries....

two birds with one stone!

Jason Dunn · September 14, 2007

Hi Marlof! Nice running into you here.

marlof wrote:

One setting I named Smugmug800, it creates 800x600 files of the images I don't mind the world to see, and it places these in a directory called images\upload\name of gallery....One setting I named SmugmugFull, it creates full size files of images I want to share with family and friends only...Then I run two instances of Send To Smugmug...I only caption the public folders.

What you've described seems like a fairly refined workflow for the way Smugmug works today, but other than the issue of not wanting the general public to have access to high-resolution images, wouldn't you prefer to just upload once? There are a lot of clever ways to get around the limitations that Smugmug has in this regard, but ultimately if you could have:

1) One upload of your images
2) Entering the password would unlock the hidden images, and also give the user access to the high-resolution images
3) Comments on all your photos instead of just the public ones

Wouldn't that be better?

Jason Dunn · September 14, 2007

Wildearth wrote:

I like the idea of having more flexibility in this way, but am not sure individual photo passwords are the solution. It could get unwieldly to manage, both from the standpoint of the member and of the user.

Well, I guess "unwieldly" is in the eye of the beholder, but in my mind it would be extremely simple: I'd always use the same password on all my albums, so any time friends and family visit they'd only ever have to use one password.

Wildearth wrote:

Make galleries nestable. That is, let me make gallery A and gallery B as different galleries. They show on my home page as individual galleries. But then let me nest gallery B inside gallery A. If a visitor clicks on B, she sees B, but if she clicks on A then she sees A + B.

That definitely sounds like a cool idea, although image order is very important to me, so the A+B would have to combine the galleries in a very specific way (probably date taken) keeping all the photos in order, which might be pretty complex.

It's good to think through and discuss things like this though.

Jason Dunn · September 14, 2007

Baldy wrote:

The first is it would be a lot of work because of the way our architecture is laid out.

Well that's most unfortunate. :cry Can you describe the problem the current architecture would have with this? I work with developers quite a bit, and I'd like to understand what barriers Smugmug would run into trying to implement this. If you have the time to explain, and it's not proprietary information, perhaps there's a way to get what I'm suggesting without too much pain.

Baldy wrote:

The second is SmugIslands was a long, hard, expensive grind that had us chasing performance issues for months after.

I bet it was! Ultimately my suggestion would be for "v2 privacy upgrades" or however you guys do your development cycles - it's more something I wanted to propose for long-term thinking about the issue. I don't know of any photo service that offers anything like this today, so it would be a unique feature for Smugmug, and I think it would be extremely easy to market and explain.

And hey, if you can't do this, can you at least make my homepage photos bigger?

Jason Dunn · September 14, 2007

ChrisG wrote:

A few months back I had a cousin in town with her daughter for my sisters wedding. We went to the zoo the morning of and I took a bunch of great pictures. The cousin preferred that I not post pictures of her daughter on-line in a public area, so I ended up making the whole set private rather than just those with them in it.

Yeah, this is EXACTLY what I'm talking about. With Smugmug's current system, you only have three options:

1) Make the gallery private so your cousin can see it with a password, but no one else can see your zoo pictures

2) Make the gallery public so everyone can see your zoo pictures, but tick off your cousin for not respecting her daughter's privacy

3) Upload one copy of the full photos, password protect them, then upload another copy and delete all the photos of your cousin's daughter

All three of those options have down-sides, and the only one that gets you what you want is #3 - but uploading everything twice is a pain and if you wanted to caption the photos, you'd have to pick one set (or have a lot of spare time on your hands).

Would you like to see enhanced privacy options?

Would you like to see this feature I've proposed implemented? 19 votes

Comments