password protected Category?

koko_lopez

ahoy all. I'm a newspaper and wedding photographer, and I put my wedding pictures up on my pro smugmug account. So far that is all I have really done, but I was thinking that it would be neato to put galleries of my friends and I goofing off up also; you know, for fun.
That being said, I don't really want my wedding clients to even be able to see that there are any non proffessional photography type galleries around. SOooo, I was wondering, is there a way to say, make a category called, say 'architecture' then password protect it so that you can't even see the galleries inside of it without a password?
I have tried the whole private gallery thing, but it is a pain in the neck.
Alternatively, is there a way to have a category the contents of which can only be seen when going to that direct page, ie. by pointing my browser to www.mysite.smugmug.com/architecture with no other icons showing up on my page anywhere.
that would be awesome.
Anyone have any thoughts? I don't want to let on to my clients that I am a bit of a slacker.
Cheers

jfriend

I need the same thing

koko_lopez wrote:

... SOooo, I was wondering, is there a way to say, make a category called, say 'architecture' then password protect it so that you can't even see the galleries inside of it without a password?
I have tried the whole private gallery thing, but it is a pain in the neck.
Alternatively, is there a way to have a category the contents of which can only be seen when going to that direct page, ie. by pointing my browser to www.mysite.smugmug.com/architecture with no other icons showing up on my page anywhere that would be awesome.

I've looked for similar functionality. I needed to post 20 different galleries from a school talent show and by school rules, everything I posted had to be password protected. I likewise wanted a password protected category. I couldn't find anything like that so I had to settle for password protecting each gallery in a non-password protected category. Fortunately (and to my surprise), if you put the same password on every gallery, then smugmug will only prompt the user for the password once on the first gallery they open, so it works pretty much like a password protected category except they can see the list of galleries before entering the password.

As for isolating your wedding clients from the rest of your work, there is not currently a way to do that. I wanted to share the talent show photos with the rest of the school, but didn't really intend to share the rest of my photos with the whole school. I've asked for the same thing on help@smugmug.com and here and the only suggestion I got was to open a separate account which isn't practical for each major event you shoot. I do think this is a sorely missing feature for people who do event photography. If you are listening smugmug, we'd really like the ability to share a sub-tree of galleries (e.g. a category) and have that not obviously lead to the rest of our site. Today the breadcrumbs at the top of the page lead to a higher level than what you want shared. And, I can't turn breadcrumbing off because it's needed to navigate among different galleries that are being shared.

In case you actually use this mechanism of assigning the same password to a whole bunch of galleries, I found out that you can manually set the thumbnail for each gallery because on a password protected gallery, no thumbnail shows by default. But, if you pick a photo for the gallery thumbnail on each gallery, then that one will show even though it's password protected.

--John