Does a site wide password give security to all photos?

Thronsen

I am pretty careful of never allowing any photos of my son to 'escape' onto the web. My basic feeling is once it is out there, anywhere, there will be a copy of it lurking around forever, and the baby picture of him that I find so cute he would rather not have floating out there when he is a teenager.

Does a site wide password prevent ALL of my photos being seen by any search engine, crawler, spider or whatever, always? Nothing can see them if they dont have the password, ever?

Including galleries within my site that are listed, galleries that are not password protected (other then by the site wide), or galleries that I feature on my SM page.

Including the account bio photo, including featured photos in galleries, including really every photo on my site.

A search engine or an infinite amount of monkeys could bang out smugmug urls all day, and they will never catch a glimpse of a photo on my site.

Apologies for being paranoid, but this is one of those things where you only need to make 1 mistake and its out there forever. And Privacy and stability are the reason why I chose Smugmug over cheaper sites.

Thanks.

denisegoldberg

You might want to take a look at this page - http://www.smugmug.com/help/private-search-island.

--- Denise

Thronsen

denisegoldberg wrote:

You might want to take a look at this page - http://www.smugmug.com/help/private-search-island.

--- Denise

Yup, thanks I have read all the FAQ and descriptions I can find on the site. And while normally I appreciate Smugmugs friendly way of phrasing things, I am really looking for a boring, clear cut answer. For example, what does 'No trespassing sign for Google' really mean? Im pretty sure I know, but not 100% sure.

Does the site wide pword give complete security to all the photos on your site?

Andy

Thronsen wrote:

Yup, thanks I have read all the FAQ and descriptions I can find on the site. And while normally I appreciate Smugmugs friendly way of phrasing things, I am really looking for a boring, clear cut answer. For example, what does 'No trespassing sign for Google' really mean? Im pretty sure I know, but not 100% sure.

Does the site wide pword give complete security to all the photos on your site?

Set SmugIslands to No and No, for Hello World, Hello Smuggers.

Set your galleries to unlisted, and the password on your front door.

Set external links to 'off' on your photos as well.

jfriend

Andy wrote:

Set SmugIslands to No and No, for Hello World, Hello Smuggers.

Set your galleries to unlisted, and the password on your front door.

Set external links to 'off' on your photos as well.

Why set your galleries to unlisted? Then nobody can see them, even people you give the the site password to. If the site is password protected, there should be no need to unlist everything.

Thronsen

jfriend wrote:

Why set your galleries to unlisted? Then nobody can see them, even people you give the the site password to. If the site is password protected, there should be no need to unlist everything.

Yup, I have the same question. Why would a listed gallery be viewable if your site is protected by a password?

I dont want to have to set all security at total maximum by default. I would like my family to be able to see the pictures with a password. I just want to prevent anyone or any machine without a password from seeing anything.

Thronsen

Andy wrote:

Set SmugIslands to No and No, for Hello World, Hello Smuggers.

Set your galleries to unlisted, and the password on your front door.

Set external links to 'off' on your photos as well.

Also, while I have Hello World set to 'No', I have Hello Smugglers set to 'Only on my Smugmug site' (which comes from option #3 'No - Make me an Island' as opposed to #4 'No - Total Lockdown').

I would like to be able to allow people with the site wide password to use the search features (keyword, calendar, etc). I just want to make sure that anyone or any machine without the site password wont glimpse any pictures.

Thronsen

For external links, if I am reading your post correctly, it doesnt matter if you have a password (whether site or gallery) or not? It will go through without the password as long as you have External links on?

Thanks again.

AnneMcBean

Thronsen wrote:

For external links, if I am reading your post correctly, it doesnt matter if you have a password (whether site or gallery) or not? It will go through without the password as long as you have External links on?

Thanks again.

I'm guessing Andy said "unlisted" for galleries because he thought you wanted complete privacy for a certain subset of your photos. If you don't do that, obviously whoever has your site password can at least see that the galleries exist and see the featured photo and gallery title.

I will answer your original question: Yes, a site-wide password means nobody can see photos on your site. Or anything else about your site. Not your bio, homepage, anything at all.

You don't even have to worry about SmugIslands, really, because Google can't see a thing regardless of that setting. You hit the nail on the head with Hello Smuggers... either people can search after they type in your site password... or only YOU can search. Those are really the only two options that aren't just trumped by a site password.

As far as external links are concerned, this is a photo from a site with a site-wide password:




And this is a photo from a password-protected gallery on a site without site-wide password protection:



Can you see how cute my girl is? That is by design. So a password protects visitors from gaining access TO THAT GALLERY (or site), and if you want to prevent you or your visitors from externally displaying photos, you'll want to turn off external links for each gallery.

Here are direct links to those two photos on SmugMug, so you can see that they don't require a password to view:
http://p23ks99a.smugmug.com/photos/495830367_F5o2P-X3.jpg
http://beanland.smugmug.com/photos/490375474_4tJEs-X2.jpg

And here is a link to a photo with external links turned OFF, even though it resides in a gallery and site without password protection:
http://beanland.smugmug.com/photos/421109381_oiVRx-X2.jpg

I've tried to display that photo here:



So you will want to turn off external links if you'd rather not allow visitors from your site (or yourself) to post photos elsewhere. Of course, people could do a screen capture and post THAT elsewhere, but that really couldn't be done inadvertently.

To be clear, no one would be able to get the link to post a picture elsewhere anyway unless they had gained access (via password) to your site in the first place.

Make sense?

-Anne

Thronsen

Yes Anne, that makes alot of sense. Thanks alot for taking the time to explain it to me.

And your little girl is very cute!