"Private / Secure" collect feature

tfboy · May 8, 2011

I don't know if there's an easy way to do this. It's similar to the collect feature, except I want the destination gallery to not show the source. Also, the destination should enforce the size limits set in the destination gallery, not the source.

Scenario: I have a hidden gallery I use in which I place all photos posted in forums. I put them in a hidden gallery so that people can't trace the actual gallery origin in the path. I haven't anonymised it 'cos I do want people to know where they came from, just not the exact gallery they came from

In fact, I use several hidden galleries and use the hit statistics to see where my traffic is coming from

This hidden web-forum gallery(ies) is the "destination".

Now there can be many source galleries, and there would be photos in these galleries which I want to place a virtual copy of in the web-forum gallery. Also, whilst the source gallery might have high resolution photos, I'd want their virtual copies in the web-forum gallery to be limited in size, say large.

Currently, I can't find an easy way of doing it. Collecting photos does what I want as far as creating a virtual copy, but shows where the source is so that's no good to me.

I use Lightroom and the workaround I have is creating two Smugmug "upload accounts", one has the resolution limited in its settings, the other has full res. I use the res-limited one to upload a duplicate of the photo to the web-forum gallery. But it's double the effort and a bit of a shame as I'd hope the actual feature I want to be a smugmug thing.

So:
a) Does that make sense? and
b) Is it something that's possible somehow or
c) Should I put this in as a feature request?

Ta muchly

jfriend · May 9, 2011

I don't understand much of your post, but collected photos on Smugmug obey the settings in the original gallery, not the settings of the collected gallery. That's how they designed it. There is no work-around I know of other than uploading a second copy to a new gallery.

You can hide the link to the original gallery with CSS. We would need to know whether you want to hide this site-wide or only in which galleries or only in some categories/sub-categories to advise what CSS would work for you.

tfboy · May 9, 2011

Hi John,

I realise I didn't use quite the same terminology as that of smugmug, so will try to explain using the right words

I often post in forums and want to embed photos using the classic "img" and "/img" tags with the path to the jpg photo.

The root url of my smugmug account is http://photos.xavimages.co.uk. In other words, that's the same as http://xavimages.smugmug.com.

When I embed photos in forum posts, I want the photos to be in an unlisted gallery. Why? Because in the unlisted gallery, the path to the URL is seemingly random. For example, h**p://photos.xavimages.co.uk/photos/1134407535_y9kgT-L-1.jpg

If someone looks at the source of the embedded photo, they see that url path. If they delete the 11344..., to end up with just http://photos.xavimages.co.uk/photos/ they don't get to see anything. It's a protected method of ensuring they can't get access to any other photos on your site.
Of course, someone who knows the Smugmug system can replace the L at the end of the filename with O to get to the original file size, but that can be limited by controlling the maximum size permitted in the gallery

The issue is that if a photo is taken from an normal, listed gallery, the url to the jpeg reflects the gallery structure. For example: h**p://photos.xavimages.co.uk/Travel/Orlando-Kennedy-Space-Center/110227Orlando-KSC48/1204844759_Tjm9N-L-1.jpg.
There, they only have to delete the 11022... onwards to get to the root of the gallery and then see the gallery listing as anyone else does. When I embed photos on forums, I don't want people to be able to find other photos.

It's similar to using the anonymous feature. That would work too.

Having photos in an unlisted gallery works around all those problems and that's fine - the "anonymous gallery" feature does this and takes out my domain name in the process as well. The annoyance is that there's no way to automatically have duplicated photos appear in an unlisted gallery; I have to upload a second copy from Lightroom or I have to make a duplicate photo (several clicks within Smugmug) then move that photo to my unlisted gallery (several more clicks). When I have a dozen photos to do, that's a lot of clicking.

OK, it's not that much work, but it seems a shame that there's no "feature" that allows one to do that. If there's a "collect photos" feature, all the steps have already been coded, but the permissions are kind of "back to front".

Now if there was another kind of "collect photo" feature which allowed one to have copies or virtual copies of photos from random galleries collected into a designated unlisted (or anonymous) gallery, it would allow anonymous / secure embedding with minimal hassle.

Does that make sense?

I appreciate I'm asking for a different feature to what "collect" is designed for, and I'm not complaining at all about how "collect" works; it's great and does exactly what it's designed to do. I was just hoping that there might be a quirky way of achieving what I wanted. But if there isn't, I'll put it in as a feature request.

jfriend · May 9, 2011

tfboy wrote: »

Hi John,

I realise I didn't use quite the same terminology as that of smugmug, so will try to explain using the right words

I often post in forums and want to embed photos using the classic "img" and "/img" tags with the path to the jpg photo.

The root url of my smugmug account is http://photos.xavimages.co.uk. In other words, that's the same as http://xavimages.smugmug.com.

When I embed photos in forum posts, I want the photos to be in an unlisted gallery. Why? Because in the unlisted gallery, the path to the URL is seemingly random. For example, h**p://photos.xavimages.co.uk/photos/1134407535_y9kgT-L-1.jpg

If someone looks at the source of the embedded photo, they see that url path. If they delete the 11344..., to end up with just http://photos.xavimages.co.uk/photos/ they don't get to see anything. It's a protected method of ensuring they can't get access to any other photos on your site.
Of course, someone who knows the Smugmug system can replace the L at the end of the filename with O to get to the original file size, but that can be limited by controlling the maximum size permitted in the gallery

The issue is that if a photo is taken from an normal, listed gallery, the url to the jpeg reflects the gallery structure. For example: h**p://photos.xavimages.co.uk/Travel/Orlando-Kennedy-Space-Center/110227Orlando-KSC48/1204844759_Tjm9N-L-1.jpg.
There, they only have to delete the 11022... onwards to get to the root of the gallery and then see the gallery listing as anyone else does. When I embed photos on forums, I don't want people to be able to find other photos. It's similar to using the anonymous feature. That would work too.

Having photos in an unlisted gallery works around all those problems and that's fine - the "anonymous gallery" feature does this and takes out my domain name in the process as well. The annoyance is that there's no way to automatically have duplicated photos appear in an unlisted gallery; I have to upload a second copy from Lightroom or I have to make a duplicate photo (several clicks within Smugmug) then move that photo to my unlisted gallery (several more clicks). When I have a dozen photos to do, that's a lot of clicking.

OK, it's not that much work, but it seems a shame that there's no "feature" that allows one to do that. If there's a "collect photos" feature, all the steps have already been coded, but the permissions are kind of "back to front".

Now if there was another kind of "collect photo" feature which allowed one to have copies or virtual copies of photos from random galleries collected into a designated unlisted (or anonymous) gallery, it would allow anonymous / secure embedding with minimal hassle.

Does that make sense?

I appreciate I'm asking for a different feature to what "collect" is designed for, and I'm not complaining at all about how "collect" works; it's great and does exactly what it's designed to do. I was just hoping that there might be a quirky way of achieving what I wanted. But if there isn't, I'll put it in as a feature request.

If you aren't trying to get Google search relevance for your posted images, then you can just use the same URL form for a public gallery that you like for the unlisted gallery. It works there too and then there will be no indication of the gallery. You will have to manually construct the URL to get the private form, but it will still work.

So, instead of:

http://photos.xavimages.co.uk/Travel/Orlando-Kennedy-Space-Center/110227Orlando-KSC48/1204844759_Tjm9N-L-1.jpg

you can use:

http://photos.smugmug.com/photos/1204844759_Tjm9N-L-1.jpg

And, you can use this second form on any image in any gallery whether public or private. It avoids both your domain and your gallery structure, but still renders the same image. It won't give your site any Google search relevance, but you can't hide domain and gallery structure and have Google search juice from the image - you have to pick one or the other.

tfboy · May 9, 2011

Thanks John, I didn't know that you could do that

It half fixes the problem, so that's a good stop gap until I can find a way of summarising what I want into simple and short comprehensible English and put it in as a feature request

"Private / Secure" collect feature

Comments