turning off keyword capability?

marieboyer

I have been reading another thread on this forum. I am completely confused by it. I have my family photos in password protected galleries. I assure my family that people without the passwrod cannot access these photos. Is this accurate?

If not, is it because of the keyword capability within smugmug? If so, how can I turn off the keyword capability for my entire site? I looked and could not find the answer.

I could be a confused newbie. The other thread could be unnecessarily causing me angst. Thanks!

Andy

marieboyer wrote:

I have been reading another thread on this forum. I am completely confused by it. I have my family photos in password protected galleries. I assure my family that people without the passwrod cannot access these photos. Is this accurate?

If not, is it because of the keyword capability within smugmug? If so, how can I turn off the keyword capability for my entire site? I looked and could not find the answer.

I could be a confused newbie. The other thread could be unnecessarily causing me angst. Thanks!

Keywords have no effect in private or passworded galleries.
To have no keywords, don't use them. If you have keywords, go to the photos and delete them, if you like.

nickname.smugmug.com/keyword will tell you if you have any.

I hope this helps!

marieboyer

Thanks Andy.
Your answer tells me that I am not worried about keywords -- since no one other than those who have the passwords can access them and the photos. I may have misunderstood the information in the other thread. Maybe the people in the other thread thought they should have public galleries with no keyword accessibilty? Thanks so much anyway.

Andy wrote:

Keywords have no effect in private or passworded galleries.
To have no keywords, don't use them. If you have keywords, go to the photos and delete them, if you like.

nickname.smugmug.com/keyword will tell you if you have any.

I hope this helps!

gblotter

using keywords exposes photos to Google crawling

marieboyer wrote:

Your answer tells me that I am not worried about keywords -- since no one other than those who have the passwords can access them and the photos. I may have misunderstood the information in the other thread.

Marie,

You did not misunderstand the other thread. There is a privacy concern associated with using keywords.

To summarize the problem:

Keywords will not work with Private Galleries, so you have no exposure there.

However, keywords do work with password protection. And yes - your photos are exposed to Google crawling in that scenario. Google will crawl the keyword index to your password-protected photos. Once Google has direct URL access to those photos, they become viewable to the world. This is what others have referred to as "backdoor access".

In a different thread, Onethumb mentioned that this was considered a bug and that keywords would cease to work with password protection once the bug is fixed.

If you are concerned about the privacy of your photos, your easiest solution is to simply not use any keywords throughout your smugmug account. Deleting existing keywords is easy with the "Bulk Edit Caption/Keywords" function (located under photo tools).

marieboyer

Yikes. :uhoh Thanks for clarifying that, Andy. That is dangerous for folks like me who have assured parents that their kids' photos are not accessible to the public unless they have the password. :cry I think for your customers' sake there should be some mention of this bug in the "help -- privacy & security" section until it's fixed.

One remaining question, though, it seems keywords are automatic with captions. I have not been adding keywords; they magically appear. How do I turn off this feature entirely, Andy? (Without turning my whole site, private?)

Wow, I just realized how dangerous this is. Smugmug is adding keywords to customers' password protected photos and then the public, unbeknownst to the Smugmug customer, is getting access to the otherwise private photos. I am so troubled by this. Not sure what to do while bug is being fixed.

Thanks for your help, Andy. Appreciate your honesty, as well.

marieboyer

Andy:
I just went into my control panel and removed keywords from displaying on my homepage. Will that take care of this bug until it is fixed?

As you can see, I am looking for a quick fix. I have tons of galleries and going into each individually would be a lot of time.

I will keep checking this today. Thanks for your help.

gblotter

marieboyer wrote:

I just went into my control panel and removed keywords from displaying on my homepage. Will that take care of this bug until it is fixed?

No, the keywords are still there. Your action merely hides them from being displayed on the homepage. Until you actually delete the keywords, the keyword index still exists for Google crawling.

marieboyer wrote:

As you can see, I am looking for a quick fix. I have tons of galleries and going into each individually would be a lot of time.

Try this as an alternate method of deleting keywords.

1. Go back into the control panel and display keywords on your homepage.
2. Go to your homepage and click on an individual keyword.
3. Select "Bulk Edit Captions/Keywords" from keyword tools menu.
4. Select "empy" --> "all" --> "keywords" from the the available choices.
5. Click save button.

You will need to repeat this for each keyword in your index. Depending on the number of keywords you have, perhaps it will be faster than doing it for each individual gallery.

dmc

captions too...
google crawls through your captions too, not just the keywords.

dmc

gallery descriptions too...

gblotter

dmc wrote:

google crawls through your captions too, not just the keywords.

This is true - but I don't believe it is a concern when password protection is set. The only reason why keywords are a problem is that there exists an independent keyword index that can be crawled even when a password is set. I don't know of a similar index that can be crawled for captions and gallery descriptions.

marieboyer

Because keywords are added automatically by Smugmug, I do not want to upload any more photos on bulk until the bug is fixed. (All mine have captions.)

How will we find out that the bug has been fixed? Will it be posted somewhere?

Thanks in advance.

gblotter

marieboyer wrote:

Because keywords are added automatically by Smugmug, I do not want to upload any more photos on bulk until the bug is fixed. (All mine have captions.)

It is a simple thing to remove keywords after uploading new photos to a gallery. In a single operation, you can remove all keywords for all photos in that gallery following the steps I outlined earlier. Your captions do not create a privacy problem if you have password protection set.

onethumb

gblotter wrote:

Marie,

You did not misunderstand the other thread. There is a privacy concern associated with using keywords.

To summarize the problem:

Keywords will not work with Private Galleries, so you have no exposure there.

However, keywords do work with password protection. And yes - your photos are exposed to Google crawling in that scenario. Google will crawl the keyword index to your password-protected photos. Once Google has direct URL access to those photos, they become viewable to the world. This is what others have referred to as "backdoor access".

In a different thread, Onethumb mentioned that this was considered a bug and that keywords would cease to work with password protection once the bug is fixed.

If you are concerned about the privacy of your photos, your easiest solution is to simply not use any keywords throughout your smugmug account. Deleting existing keywords is easy with the "Bulk Edit Caption/Keywords" function (located under photo tools).

Apologies if I'm misunderstanding the problem, but I believe this was fixed awhile ago.

Both Private and Passworded galleries shouldn't have keyworded photos showing up outside of those galleries.

If you do see some photos violating that policy, try removing the password from your gallery, saving, and then re-adding the password. Wait a few minutes for our security crawler to have a chance to reset the security settings, and check again. It's possible older galleries are still "broken" and didn't get updated when the fix went out.

Thanks,

Don

marieboyer

That just gave me a huge sense of relief. Yeow! Thanks.

gblotter

onethumb wrote:

Apologies if I'm misunderstanding the problem, but I believe this was fixed awhile ago.

Both Private and Passworded galleries shouldn't have keyworded photos showing up outside of those galleries.

If you do see some photos violating that policy, try removing the password from your gallery, saving, and then re-adding the password. Wait a few minutes for our security crawler to have a chance to reset the security settings, and check again. It's possible older galleries are still "broken" and didn't get updated when the fix went out.

Hi Don,

The use of terminology is probably important here (whether referring to account passwords or gallery passwords).

I did a little test and discovered that when a gallery password is set, keyword functionality is indeed disabled. However, when only an account password is set, keyword functionality still exists. The keyword index youraccount.smugmug.com/keyword still exists and can still be crawled by Google even when an account password is set. This provides the backdoor access to password protected photos via direct URL that has previously been mentioned.

Was your bug fix directed at account level passwords, or just gallery level passwords?

Greg

onethumb

gblotter wrote:

Hi Don,

The use of terminology is probably important here (whether referring to account passwords or gallery passwords).

I did a little test and discovered that when a gallery password is set, keyword functionality is indeed disabled. However, when only an account password is set, keyword functionality still exists. The keyword index youraccount.smugmug.com/keyword still exists and can still be crawled by Google even when an account password is set. This provides the backdoor access to password protected photos via direct URL that has previously been mentioned.

Was your bug fix directed at account level passwords, or just gallery level passwords?

Greg

Both. You tried toggling your account password?

Note that it can take up to an hour for account password changes to propogate, depending on how many photos you have that we need to disable.

Gallery password changes should be much faster, since they deal with less photos, but are still not instant.

Don

gblotter

onethumb wrote:

You tried toggling your account password?

That worked. Toggling the account password removed the keyword index. Sorry to trouble you over this.

Greg

onethumb

gblotter wrote:

That worked. Toggling the account password removed the keyword index. Sorry to trouble you over this.

Greg

No worries, it's good input. We may need to re-crawl people's accounts who have a password set.

We definitely did have a problem before, and I think it was you who brought it to our attention. I'm glad we fixed it, sorry for the speed bumps.

Don