Family site - best way to protect
Opps
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I got the suggestion from my family to set up a place where they could find all family photos. I, of course, want this site to be completely private so I could password protect all the albums but I wonder if there is a better way to do it. Is it for example possible to set up the site so that it asks you for password directly when you try to access it and once in, it looks like a public site (with thumbnails for the albums etc)?
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Jan Erik Moström
Jan Erik Moström
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Yup, just set up a site-wide password.
http://www.smugmug.com/help/site-security
Jan Erik Moström
The site-password can only apply to the entire account, so if you want anything that isn't under the site-password, you can't use it.
Beyond this, your tools are password protected galleries, unlisted galleries, categories, sharegroups, hide owner and events.
Public galleries on your site will be available to everyone.
Unlisted galleries on your site will not show in the public listing on your site. You can send the URL of an unlisted site to anyone and they can access it directly. Nobody will know about an unlisted gallery unless you or someone else you tell passes it to them. Once someone accesses an unlisted gallery, it will generally lead them to the rest of your site unless you make the gallery Hide Owner. Making it hide owner will give it a www.smugmug.com URL (instead of your domain) and give it a generic look (no customization, but a viewer will not be able to see any of your other galleries or your Smugmug site from the URL.
Sharegroups can be used to bind multiple unlisted galleries into a single group (kind of like an unlisted category). You can send someone a single sharegroup URL and they can then view multiple unlisted galleries that are in that sharegroup. Sharegroups do not show on your public site.
You may also want to read more about events in the Smugmug help system. I haven't really used or understood them fully, but I think you can have a password protected event that contains multiple galleries (kind of like a password protected category).
Overall, it's easy to make a single gallery have restricted access or hidden from the public. You can group hidden galleries together into sharegroups. But, it is not easy to share groups of galleries with people and hide your public site from them. If you really want to do that, they you probably want two Smugmug sites. I have one site for family and one site for all the community photography I do (kid's sports, school events, etc...). That way I can share the community photography widely, but it won't be directly connected to all my family photography.
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Jan Erik Moström
Morning,
I had same problem where I wanted to share a number of galleries with friends but didn't want them to see the family ones. After some trial and error I gave up on SmugMug's tools and facilities. "This is not easy", as JFriend says. Therefor I adopted a different approach, I solved it outside of SmugMug.
All galleries that were to be seen by friends were marked with "Hide Owner=Yes". Then I created a small and simple homepage where I leinked to these galleries. This homepage was then given to my friends. Now they can easily go to any gallery I have listed there. And due to "hide owner" they can not get over to the other album.
Main drawback is that I need to update this homepage now and then but this is not a big deal considering I got what I wanted. I now have a corner in SmugMug for my friends. And family can also get to these albums from the sub-category but friends can not get to the family ones.
What I really want to have is kind of a "Hide Owner" fundtion on sub-categeroy and category level. A facility where I could supress the possibility to go up but allow to go down. If SmugMug implemented such a facility I would be very happy.
Regards, Harald
My focus is on digitizing memories
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I'm not sure I completely understand this. Can you share your "small and simple homepage" with me?
I tried using a ShareGroup, but they still need my Site-Wide password to see the photos.
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Thanks Andy,
Did try a Sharegroup some time ago and there was something that didn't work as expected. Proably that I coulnd't hide the breadcrumbs, as JFriend suggest.
Regards, Harald
My focus is on digitizing memories
Morning,
This is a homepage for a smaller group, actually my neighbours, showing the area where we live. I want both this homepage and these albums to have a low profile. Therefore I have sent you a message with some details
Regards, Harald
My focus is on digitizing memories
http://www.smugmug.com/share/ALUd126gdej0U
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Not true
that is a two-gallery share group, both galleries are hide-owner set.
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To be honest, John, I never tried it till I saw this thread and Harald's question. Since Hide-owner has no breadcrumbs, I added two hide-owner galleries to a sharegroup and voila. It just made sense to me. If you think this needs to be called out on the sharegroups help page, happy to add it.
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So, Andy, do I understand correctly that I still cannot set a site-wide password for this to work? That seems to be the case.
Sure you can. But the visitor would need to have the site-wide viewing password to view the sharegroup.
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Okay, I get it. I'm giving a stranger the password to my site, but they don't actually know what the address of my site is.
Security through obscurity. This suggestion on UserVoice might be something for you: http://feedback.smugmug.com/forums/17723-smugmug/suggestions/237213-privacy-groups-with-separate-passwords-with-acces
Malte
Yes, it is. Thanks Malte.
using categories because there are usually a limited number.
Turn off the category/gallery box under "homepage layout" Button or better
still, hide the box with CSS so you, logged in, can navigate your site. Even
if someone finds the private galleries each will be protected with a PW and
all they'll see is a thumb.
Create an unlisted HTML landing page for each and add all your category
links/thumbs to it. Example here. For the private HTML landing page set a
password and use that same password for all the private galleries.
Example here of PW'ed landing page.
Your navbar could look something like this.
Home | About | Public Galleries | Private Galleries | Guestbook | Contact
My Website index | My Blog
Correct,
Just tested this with 5 galleries. When 4 had HIDE OWNER=YES and one = NO then the uplink was shown on Sharegroup level. But as soon as I made all 5 =YES it immediately dissapeared.
Andy, this is a very important nugget. I suggest you ask some technical person look at this from the inside to see there isn't a gotcha somewhere. If not, you should definitely add this as a hint to the help page of a Sharegroup
Regards, Harald
My focus is on digitizing memories
There's no gotcha.
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I will try this way next time. Now when I have my small homepage set-up I say it is better. Maybe I will include a link to a sharegroup among the links to albums.
This is interesting and may be usefull for next set of people. Of course I wish there were more, like haveing a sub-category level also in a sharegroup. But for the moment this is a solution almost on level with my small home-page.
Regards, Harald
My focus is on digitizing memories
Here's how I set mine up. It takes some work, but this is the most robust solution that I could find without hosting my own stuff and building a site or having viewers create logins/passwords.
I have a sitewide password and password protect each gallery but do not hide owner. Personally, I find it a hassle to have the breadcrumbs/nav missing, which is why I leave it enabled.
I basically have 4 categories.
-Family
-Church
-Work
-School
I upload to a gallery in one of the categories based upon the primary setting of the photos. For example, I might take pictures of my kids, my relatives' kids, and some kids from church at a "School" soccer game. However, I might not want to share all the photos with all the groupings. So I go through the photos and create virtual galleries from the "School" soccer game - one might be kids from church and another might be relatives' kids.
I have password protected sharegroups that give access to all galleries in the sharegroup. One sharegroup might be for my parents and brothers and sisters - in that sharegroup, I will place the gallery of collected photos from the soccer game. Another sharegroup might be for church - in that sharegroup, I will put the collected photo gallery of the church kids from the soccer game.
I know this is a lot of work sifting and sorting through photos multiple times, but this method allows me the security and ease of sharing options that I want.
Wow! That does seem like a lot of work.
Yes, this is a lot of work. And so is my own solution where I created my own homepage. To me these home-made solutions /workarounds is an indication we have a missing functionality in SmugMug which is wanted by at least the people in this thread.
I suppport the suggested Feature Request mention earlier, this one, as a way forward: http://feedback.smugmug.com/forums/1...rds-with-acces
Regards, Harald
My focus is on digitizing memories