Google maps while protecting kids??
TheDuck
Registered Users Posts: 68 Big grins
Sigh....just as I was starting to feel good about getting the tweaks right.
I recently started geoencoding photos, and I love google earth and google maps. But....I discovered that google search was pulling up some of my photos of school and sporting events because of keywords. Not cool, because some parents are *very* sensitive about strangers grabbing photos of their kids. So...I was happy to learn about using the site password to restrict access to family and friends.
And then...I discover that Smugmug tells me that "We're sorry, but since you have a password set for your entire SmugMug site, you cannot use the Google Maps feature. Google requires that all usage of Maps be done without requiring a password."
So...I can't map family vacations without putting my kids on public display?? Are there any alternatives here???
Bummer.
Thanks for any help that Andy or anyone can provide!!!
Be seeing you,
The Duck
I recently started geoencoding photos, and I love google earth and google maps. But....I discovered that google search was pulling up some of my photos of school and sporting events because of keywords. Not cool, because some parents are *very* sensitive about strangers grabbing photos of their kids. So...I was happy to learn about using the site password to restrict access to family and friends.
And then...I discover that Smugmug tells me that "We're sorry, but since you have a password set for your entire SmugMug site, you cannot use the Google Maps feature. Google requires that all usage of Maps be done without requiring a password."
So...I can't map family vacations without putting my kids on public display?? Are there any alternatives here???
Bummer.
Thanks for any help that Andy or anyone can provide!!!
Be seeing you,
The Duck
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Doesn't work - as long as a site password exists, Smugmug disables *all* mapping on all galleries and photos. Is this really Google's intent, or perhaps an aggressive interpretation at Smugmug??
Say...don't you *ever* sleep, Andy??:D
Be seeing you,
The Duck
http://www.smugmug.com/help/maps
click the expandable link "I want my photo on..."
Sleep? I can sleep when I'm dead.
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Maybe things have changed since Smugmug started offering google maps? (Or, of course, I'm just misreading the fine print late at night!). Neither the google terms of service (http://www.google.com/terms_of_service.html) nor the additional mapping terms (http://maps.google.com/help/terms_maps.html) seem to prohibit using google maps on a site where access is limited to friends and family. There is a prohibition about using google maps commercially, but I'm a Power User not a Pro User.
Maybe this is now allowed after all???
Be seeing you,
The Duck
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Google and other search sites allow sites to remove themselves from indexing - is this something I can do myself on the customization panels, or is this something Smugmug would need to do?
It seems to be a good alternative to the password option that will only annoy family and friends anyway.
I'm sorry if I seem to be beating this to death, but if you've got kids or know folks with kids I'm sure you'll understand, Andy! Thanks!
The Duck
[SIZE=-0] Remove your entire website [/SIZE]
If you wish to exclude your entire website from Google's index, you can place a file at the root of your server called robots.txt. This is the standard protocol that most web crawlers observe for excluding a web server or directory from an index. More information on robots.txt is available here: http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html. Please note that Googlebot does not interpret a 401/403 response ("Unauthorized"/"Forbidden") to a robots.txt fetch as a request not to crawl any pages on the site.
To remove your site from search engines and prevent all robots from crawling it in the future, place the following robots.txt file in your server root:
User-agent: *
Disallow: / To remove your site from Google only and prevent just Googlebot from crawling your site in the future, place the following robots.txt file in your server root:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: / Each port must have its own robots.txt file. In particular, if you serve content via both http and https, you'll need a separate robots.txt file for each of these protocols. For example, to allow Googlebot to index all http pages but no https pages, you'd use the robots.txt files below.
For your http protocol (http://yourserver.com/robots.txt):
User-agent: *
Allow: / For the https protocol (https://yourserver.com/robots.txt):
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
I have four children.
The way to not be indexed is to have no keywords, or make your site, or galleries, private.
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At this point, I can only see the solution as being two separate galleries, one sensitive and one not. Do your geocoding for shots that don't have kids in them and make them public. Kinda blows but until this gets sorted out you have to play ball.
The unfortunate realities with using a Smugmug site password are:
1) Smugmug’s heavily promoted, and very useful, “keyword indexing” is not available to protected sites or private galleries. I’ve found lots of threads discussing this frustration, and Don seems to have concluded that it is too hard for Smugmug to provide both. Given a trade-off, I’ll choose protecting children over keywords…but I’d SURE like both.
2) Smugmug turns off the very cool Google Map feature. I don’t like it, nor do I understand why. Andy says that Google requires this, but I don’t see that prohibition in the Google terms.
3) Based on a 2005 survey of customers, Don (Smugmug's co-founder and CEO) says that Smugmug customers don’t care enough about privacy (something like 2 out of 2,000 did) for the issue to be important to Smugmug, and said that Smugmug will focus efforts on more “important” customer issues such as themes. Now, I like themes and many of the other features of Smugmug, but I think Don is misinterpreting the survey results. Privacy and security are sort of like “safety” on airline surveys – people rank “food” and “seat width” as more important than safety, not because they want good food and a comfy seat during a crash, but because they view safety as a certainty, and they respond on the survey to focus attention on variables that they feel must be highlighted. Same with Smugmug – pretty themes and custom fonts mean nothing if our images are not secure from destruction – or from prying eyes. Andy is probably the most amazing customer-service representative and “good will” ambassador I’ve ever seen for any company (and as CEO of my company, I’ve worked with many excellent firms around the US and in Germany). I don’t have a particularly thin skin, but reading Andy’s comments above it seems that I’ve clearly touched a nerve. I’m not sure why, but I do wish Smugmug wouldn’t be so flippant and/or angry about privacy concerns. Curtly telling customers to not use some of the most useful and promoted features isn’t in character. If staff and customers are “passionate” about font size and colors, why not be passionate about privacy issues too?
I’ll close with the comment that I’ve used Smugmug since Nov 3, 2004. I’m probably one of their 1st year customers, despite having rarely posted on Digital Grin. I like Smugmug, and my friends like Smugmug. I signed up for a “Power Account” to be able to post videos, and I’ve never once complained about the stunningly bad offering Smugmug makes for videos. (Don says “it sucks”, so don’t flame me). I’m employed, I’m a husband and father, and I’m a photographer – not a programmer. I’ve only recently begun using some of the customization features available to Power Account holders. I like what it can do, though I don’t like having to learn HTML, CSS or to surf with JAVA on (I’ve had to remove 10 pieces of spyware during the last week while customizing my site; it’s been nearly a year since I had ANY spyware attach itself to my system – JAVA does more harm than good!). It’s only because I was playing with customization that I learned that strangers could find and access my photos, and that I could do something – but not the right thing – about it.
Privacy of kids is serious stuff. At my kids’ school, there are some children whose parents won’t allow ANY photographs to be taken for any reason. Parents can’t take even take group holiday pictures of a class if one of those kids is in it. All-school events are a nightmare. The nation was horrified by the JonBenét Ramsey child murder case, and the idea that strangers can use Google to search for cute+kids+beach or state+cheerleading+competition and find Smugmug galleries just terrifies parents - those that know it can easily be done if you keyword your photos.
I believe this IS more important than themes or custom fonts. Sure, the keywords and maps are optional, and not as important as privacy. I’ll live without them. Smugmug would do it’s customers a great service if they spelled out the choices, instead of promoting cool features without spelling out the privacy issues CLEARLY. Waiting for folks to “geek out” enough to dig in and discover the situation individually is a disappointing approach. Smugmug has over 200,000 customers, and after 116 views this thread is about to fall off the first page with you, me and Andy being the only posters. I don’t think that Digital Grin Forum or survey participation accurately provides an assessment of customer concerns regarding privacy.
Thanks for reading this long post. I hope enough other customers agree that privacy needs to be better combined with feature sets, and I hope that Don hears enough customers that it becomes a priority.
With best regards,
The Duck
you forgot another one... if you make your galleries private, it makes your category and sub-category organization useless. (sharegroups can only point to galleries)
I'm with you Duck, i've been on this bandwagon over a year myself...
Careful-- I hear those were Anna Nicole Smith's last words...
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In case this helps, if you make 10 galleries all have the same password, then a viewer who views all 10 galleries will only have to enter the password on the first gallery. Because the others all have the same password, they will get right in on the successive galleries.
When I post 20 galleries for the school talent show, I have to password protect them because of school policy, but I put them all into a category and then give them all the same password. The viewers then are challenged for the password on the first gallery they visit and then not again on any others. It works great.
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Thanks, jfriend for the suggestion. I searched the threads to see if that would help with my issues, and passwording public or private galleries still results in the loss of features at Smugmug:
1) No keyword indexing
2) No Google Maps
3) No sharegroups functionality
Plus, putting the password at the gallery, instead of the site, level creates a later administrative nightmare. Changing a site password is easy, changing individual passwords on hundreds of family and friends galleries without missing one and without making a mistake would be very difficult. Folks have asked for passwords at the category or subcat level, but Smugmug does not provide this feature.
On the other hand, using passwords at the gallery level instead of the site level does give the ability to have different passwords for paid events vs. family and friends. I personally don't shoot for pay, but some folks might like that flexibility, even with the restrictions incurred. Thanks for trying to help!!
Be seeing you,
The Duck
I was just suggesting that if you want to use all the nice features on your non-passworded galleries, you could still keep some albums private (with the resulting loss of features) and your viewers would only need to know one password. I thought that might at least be better than what you have today (no galleries that can use the features). If you don't want to do that - your choice - I was just making a suggestion.
I've been a long time advocate of letting those of us who must use passwords have some of those nice features back again (I posted about this limitation two years ago) so I'm not suggesting you (and I) don't want this, just offering a partial work-around.
As for changing passwords, I've never found a need to do so after my galleries are up. But, if you do need to change passwords on multiple galleries, you can use the bulk settings dialog to change multiple galleries at once. I have done that before when I didn't set up 30 galleries right and needed to fix them right after creating them.
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Of course, I'm not a parent, so perhaps I have to no foot to stand on here. So, I can understand you want to use google maps personally on protected albums, but I don't understand why you'd want to use keywords or sharegroups.
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As a parent designated as the official photographer for events that my daughter attends, I had found the keywords to be very helpful for my daughter's, friends, parents -- they could do a key word search on "Agnes" and would be able to grab just the photos w/ their daughter spanning several years, w/o having to wade thru all the individual galleries (also great for grandparents who care even less about the other kids.) However, after watching StatCounter and watching the behavior of some repeat visitors and the type of image they were frequently (several times / week) re-visiting, I've password protected all gallieries on my site that had kids in them. I wish we could require a password to do keyword searches on password protected images, but new/ improved security features is not a high priority.
I do agree w/ TheDuck's comments about how safety plays out on surveys -- at some level, safety/ security of images is just assumed. Had I taken the survey in '05, then I'm sure it would have been 3 out of 2000 people interested in security.
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This is absolutely wrong.
Onethumb has posted numerous times about this subject. It's always a priority with us. If he had a way to give you guys what you are asking for now, while still maintaining the functions we have today, he would.
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Thanks for that bulk settings info! Where were you a week ago when I started cleaning up attributes for my galleries?
Thanks for the question – maybe Smugmug execs and others have the same question. Don’t take it personally, but I don’t want you to see my kids’ photos via keyword searches or getting map directions to my house from my photos. Nor do I want to offer photos and maps to the many millions of other people using the internet whom I’ve never met. I would, though, like for my friends and family to be able to find photos – even in password protected galleries. They simply won’t wade through digital mountains of categories, subcategories, galleries and gallery pages to find photos the way they could with keywords. Come to think of it – even I won’t wade through my photos! I’m trying hard to clean up my organization and “catch up” on loading tons of photos to Smugmug, and I’m really disappointed to learn that keywords are not available if I use a password to protect friends and family.
Regarding sharegroups, I haven’t personally used that feature. The limitation on using sharegroups with password-protected galleries was pointed out by another Digital Grin user, and I’ve subsequently read threads on Digital Grin confirming that feature is lost with passwords. I have, though, been looking for a better way to share multiple galleries with parents, and I had planned to look at sharegroups, but won’t since sharegroups is broken with passwords. Here, though, is an example of why I would like sharegroups with password-protected galleries: I shoot lots of photos at my kids’ athletic events and other “club” activities, and share them with other parents. During a season, I set up a subcategory such as “Spring 2007 - Johnny’s ‘White Sox’ Baseball Team” (well, I *would* set up that subcategory title if subcats allowed apostrophes, but I digress). Under the subcat, I create a gallery for each practice and game. So….the breadcrumbs to a gallery might look like Sports->Spring 2007 – Johnny’s ‘White Sox’ Baseball Team->May 1 vs. The Cubs (yes, I know the subcat name is unwieldy, and could be shortened nicely and keywords could point to the photos, but NO KEYWORDS are allowed by Smugmug for password-protected galleries, remember!) So…since viewers hate navigating breadcrumbs (CEO Don has written nicely about this topic, and strongly suggests we use keywords), how do I easily point the baseball parents to the 10 galleries for the team? Sharegroups seem a great solution! Except…parents don’t want photos of their kids broadcast to you, and millions of other strangers on the internet, so I must password protect the site, or the galleries, and Smugmug turns off the sharegroups feature. Sigh.
Mapping is new to me – I don’t yet have much experience with it, as I discovered the public indexing and security design flaws (and agreement limitations?) of Smugmug simultaneously with exploring mapping. Mapping my family vacations is certainly the main reason I’m interested in mapping photos. I’ve had lots of fun going back and geocoding photos from a three week family vacation to Germany and showing the kids where they were using Google Earth. I can guarantee, though, that if my sister-in-law found that you Googled a photo of my cute 14yo niece, downloaded photos of her playing with her cousins at the beach and in the pool, and mapped the photos with Google Map to find the exact location of our family’s timeshare condo, she would hunt you down like a mad dog – right after killing me for making the photos available to you!!!
Even a completely innocent (and very nice!) photo of the hawk that was in my back yard recently, sitting in a tree 20’ from my 70-200mm f/2.8L with a 1.4x TC on a 1.6x crop body isn’t something I want to share with strangers who can use the EXIF to generate a google map to the tree in my back yard! Do I need Google map to find my own backyard? No, but I’ve got to password protect (I know…or turn off mapping and EXIF display and downloading) my nature gallery to keep *you* from finding my backyard, so my family and I then can’t map (or view EXIF, etc) where we were when I took any of my nature photos, including flowing lava in Hawai’i, unless I create separate galleries for mapping and no-mapping. I’m behind enough with loading photos to Smugmug; I’d need full-time staff to evaluate every photo for “safe to map” decisions and creating and managing secondary shadow galleries. Plus, to be mapable, the ‘safe’ lava photo has to be in a gallery that is not password-protected, so that means Google will index it and you and others will find it. Unless I want to have my bandwidth swamped by strangers downloading an original of flowing lava, taken from 15’ away (very cool shot!), I’ve got to turn originals off so I don’t get burned (accidental pun!) by 2,000 downloads from strangers as happened recently to the subscriber with the nice duck photo (no relation!!). But turning off originals means my friends and family can’t download it to print at home themselves, which I don’t want to prohibit.….well, perhaps you start to see the cascading problems – it would be ever so much easier to let friends and families map the photos to which they have access. Besides, I myself would then have to wade through extra galleries to view my own photos. Without keywords on the protected gallery, I can’t combine photos even for my own viewing.
Finally, Mapping would be fun to share with friends as well as family. Travel soccer and travel baseball and other sports teams are sort of like mini-trips with your extended family. Heck, serious players would argue that there’s nothing “mini” about some of those regional and out-of-state trips. So….how fun would it be for parents to sign on to my Smugmug site to view, download and print photos of their kids (knowing that strangers can’t surf to them), and be able to click “map this” to see where on earth (literally) their sports travels took them for each event? Very very cool….but….can’t do it on Smugmug.
I recognize that this is your final answer on this subject unless this agreement changes, but I would remind you that agreements tend not to change of their own volition, surprising affected parties with good news out of the blue. Google Maps is a beta service, and they are looking for feedback. Please ask Don or whoever handled the initial permission request to file an updated request, asking that your subscribers be permitted to use Google Maps on password-protected sites and/or galleries for non-commercial use. You might even point out that the current published Google terms-of-use do not appear to be as restrictive as the terms you believe exist between Google and Smugmug. Thanks!
I’ve read lots of threads during the past several days, trying to learn about customization and security. In lots and lots of areas, Smugmug excels at differentiating it’s brand from the everyday definition of “smug” – “complacent and self-satisfied”. Yet several customers have now spent years, however, expressing concerns and frustrations about privacy, and requesting that Smugmug improve how customers can control privacy without losing features that make Smugmug attractive to those not concerned with, or yet aware of, privacy issues.
By continuing to offer cool features only to customers who accept Smugmug’s default non-private mode, you erode the goodwill and “passion” that you’ve so carefully and wonderfully built up between Smugmug and your customers. Don likes quoting marketing statistics and surveys, so I’ll remind him of the adage that happy customers tell a friend; unhappy customers tell ten friends. Years of growth can reverse quickly.
You do listen to your customers; that’s great. You say you’re sorry when you don’t have good answers; that’s also appreciated. You make priorities of things that you feel your customers view as important; that’s much better. Don even recognizes that most of your 200,000 customers are not nearly as computer savvy as Smugmug execs and most subscribers who post on Digital Grin. Most of your 200,000 have NO IDEA about webbots, invisible 1-by-1 pixel Web beacons you place throughout Smugmug, and numerous other technical details. Further, they’ll NEVER understand those issues. They won’t take the time on their own, and Don is right when he says that educating customers is hard and expensive. “You're not getting it. Education is dang near impossible, and very expensive. We cannot afford to educate our customers, because they *do not* want to be educated…If the customer has to think or learn something new, we've lost our battle, and will lose some money.”, said Don (06-24-2005).
I believe that your customers sign-up for features, and they count on you to provide privacy options as one of the feature sets. This customer, at least, joins others in expressing my disappointment that choosing privacy on Smugmug eliminates so many Smugmug features. Yes, you’ve listened and I thank you, but I hope you choose to act and improve, rather than sit back and be “smug” about Smugmug.
Thanks again for listening, I’m going out now to spend the day with my family and make photos!
Be seeing you,
The Duck
p.s.. As I was about to post the above comments, I saw a couple additional posts have been made.
Soothing words, Andy, really, but there’s a disconnect here with what you posted on 5-5-06:
I can’t find Don’s post on the subject again, but my recollection is that he said ~2,000 responded to that survey, and since only a few mentioned privacy concerns compared with wanting new themes, that Smugmug would focus on theme development and other cool features. Don said too that there is no quarterly feature planning at Smugmug, new ideas tend to be implemented very quickly if they’re going to happen…usually in a week or less. “waaaaaaaaaaaaaay down the list” and “very, very few told us” simply don’t naturally lead to the conclusion that security is “always a priority with us”.
[FONT="]Thanks once again for listening. I’m truly sorry that Smugmug has concluded we can’t have what we are asking for. I’d rather be disappointed than unsure. Have a great day.[/FONT]
I think the original lament is that whole galleries are being crippled by the sensitivity of some of its constituent photos—the ones that have children in them. I would love to have my various travel photos up for all to see but a password (or something) could unlock all the particular photos in those galleries that have my family featured (and as a dad of 2 kids, frankly, there are a lot of these!).
Otherwise, I could make 2 galleries meant to sit side-by-side (using the arrange tools) one which has all the landscapes, street shots and architecture with all of the keywording and geocoding, and the other that has my loved ones. Fine, but I feel this could be streamlined a great deal.
The internet has enabled a whole facet of people's pervy-ness that is really terrifying to parents these days, so it has to be believed to be a real problem. At the same time, new technology is part of the compelling reason to choose a site like SmugMug which has become my main squeeze, photo-wise. I trust SmugMug to handle this better than, say, Flickr, but I do notice that even with Flickr (whose culture I have trouble buying into in general) it unlocks keywords I have designated to individual photos with permissions when I'm logged in as me, but they dissappear when I access my homepage when NOT logged in.
I sympathise with SmugMug's great minds, as permissions in general are a PITA and can breed dissatisfaction if not done properly. Still, it's the fact that SM appealed both to the family photographer as well as actual pros is what drew me towards it. I don't need to feel like I'm on MySpace, in fact just the opposite.
Do I really mean that? I don't know, but I'm trying to find a compromise solution.
We've concluded no such thing
Sorry about that, we'd rather be sure we're going to release a feature before we talk about it as a firm thing. Been that way since day one around here.
The exception was the public beta for SmugMug Ajax.
You have a great day, too!
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Sorry Andy. I re-read my hastily written post from this morning. Allow me to correct it.
All I really meant was that TO ME, implementing these new security related features (such as allowing keyword searches thru password protected galleries) does not appear to be a high priority. I didn't intend to imply that SmugMug is not interested in security. However, nothing that I've seen has, to me, seemed to indicate that its a high priority. I could easily have missed some posts, but the ones that I read indicated that its either impossible, infeasible, impractical, doesn't make sense from a cost/benefit stand point, or would add so much additional complexity that it would violate SmugMug's "prime directive" of being easy. So to me, it sounds as if it can't be done. If it can't be done, that's fine -- but if it can't be done, then I can't see how doing it would be a high priority.
Obviously it must be much more complex then simply having users enter a password to search keywords in password protected galleris. If it was that simple, I'm sure it would have been done by now.
My apologies for any confusion.
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While I'm definitely one who wants this feature, I can sympathize with the difficulty at making a good implementation. The design complexities are not simple. So, I'm not letting them off the hook, particularly given the volume of people that have asked for it, but I am at least sympathizing a bit with how much work it would be to implement and why some other things that have been done in the last year might have ranked higher.
Just think about some of these complexities of trying to figure out how to make this work:
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