Permissions for individual pictures

Mark Hewitt

Hi,
I've come here from being a flickr member, mostly because I really don't like the interface on there, and the one on smugmug seems much better.

The main reason I use flickr in the first place is the permissions system, i.e. I can control who sees each individual picture. The way I usually have it is that everyone can see pictures with no people in them, my friends can see pictures with me in them and only my family can see pictures with family members in them.

I can't find a similar option on smugmug, does it exist?

Andy

Mark Hewitt wrote:

Hi,
I've come here from being a flickr member, mostly because I really don't like the interface on there, and the one on smugmug seems much better.

The main reason I use flickr in the first place is the permissions system, i.e. I can control who sees each individual picture. The way I usually have it is that everyone can see pictures with no people in them, my friends can see pictures with me in them and only my family can see pictures with family members in them.

I can't find a similar option on smugmug, does it exist?

Hi Mark, welcome to SmugMug and Dgrin - thanks for joining us! I hate saying "no" on your first post, but the answer is "no" we don't have photo-level security. You can have security at the gallery level: http://www.smugmug.com/help/private-albums

Holler if we can help any further, and once again, welcome

Mark Hewitt

That's a shame. Flickr has the permissions system and a sucky interface. Smugmug has a good interface but no permissions system to speak of.

Maybe one of these days there will be a site which isn't missing features

Andy

Mark Hewitt wrote:

That's a shame. Flickr has the permissions system and a sucky interface. Smugmug has a good interface but no permissions system to speak of.

Maybe one of these days there will be a site which isn't missing features

Well, we do have gallery and site permissions, not to be nitpicky... we just don't have individual photo permissions.

welcome to Dgrin!

jfriend

Two sides to every coin

Mark Hewitt wrote:

That's a shame. Flickr has the permissions system and a sucky interface. Smugmug has a good interface but no permissions system to speak of.

Maybe one of these days there will be a site which isn't missing features

Just out of curiousity Mark, does Flickr require your family member viewers to log in? I would think that it has to or there's no way that it could know who to show which photos to (it wouldn't know who the viewer is without a login).

Smugmug currently has a design that never requires your viewer to login or create an account to view your photos which is considered a great characteristic by many. I realize this design choice isn't doing what you want in this case, but there are two sides to every coin.

sit

Logins are a design choice, not a requirement

jfriend wrote:

Smugmug currently has a design that never requires your viewer to login or create an account to view your photos which is considered a great characteristic by many. I realize this design choice isn't doing what you want in this case, but there are two sides to every coin.

Note that ShareGroups provide access to a specific set of private albums via a special token in the URL without requiring a login. There's no reason this can't be extended to control access to individual pictures could be similarly arranged. Knowledge of the URL (and hence the token) means that the user has been given access to a particular set of albums or images. If desired, the URL token could even be set to expire after a given number of uses.

A now-closed "boutique" hosting service called iciclelanding offered precisely this model:
http://iciclelanding.com/aperture?view=help&what=home#access_control

I personally would love to see this kind of control in SmugMug as well. I think it would be a good start even if ShareGroups were replaced with an access-granting token, and I proposed this to Andy and the SmugMug team just the other day. Unfortunately, I suspect that the number of customers desiring this kind of control is too small to make it worthwhile for them to implement it.

Mark Hewitt

jfriend wrote:

Just out of curiousity Mark, does Flickr require your family member viewers to log in? I would think that it has to or there's no way that it could know who to show which photos to (it wouldn't know who the viewer is without a login).

There is two ways of doing it in flickr, they can log in using they yahoo ID as normal. Or if they don't want to do that you can set up a 'Guest Pass' which is just a link with an ID number and it will give them the required persmissions as long as they use that link.

Any chance of a proper persmissions system ever being implemented in SmugMug? I'd quite happily pay for the full pro package if it is.

Smugmug currently has a design that never requires your viewer to login or create an account to view your photos which is considered a great characteristic by many. I realize this design choice isn't doing what you want in this case, but there are two sides to every coin.

Sure, but if I wanted a system where all photos were visible to all then I'll just use jalbum.

jfriend

Mark Hewitt wrote:

There is two ways of doing it in flickr, they can log in using they yahoo ID as normal. Or if they don't want to do that you can set up a 'Guest Pass' which is just a link with an ID number and it will give them the required persmissions as long as they use that link.

Any chance of a proper persmissions system ever being implemented in SmugMug? I'd quite happily pay for the full pro package if it is.



Sure, but if I wanted a system where all photos were visible to all then I'll just use jalbum.

Look guys, you have a legitimate feature request for individual photo permissions, but just because Smugmug doesn't have that you seem to be ignoring all the permission tools that Smugmug has and are not considering other ways to solve your problem. You can do that if you want, but saying things like there's "no proper permission system" makes me think you just aren't aware of all the tools Smugmug has. It doesn't have your specific feature request, but it has many other tools. So, here's what Smugmug has:

o Site password (protect your whole site with a password)
o Gallery password (protect a gallery with a password)
o Gallery password for multiple galleries (protect multiple galleries with the same password and the user only has to enter it once to view all of them)
o Private or hidden galleries (galleries that are not listed publicly on your site) so people only know about them if you give them a link
o Sharegroups (a way to share multiple private galleries via one link).

If you want part of a group of photos to be visible to all and part to be visible to only some people, then you just have to break those photos into two galleries. You can make one public and the other you can either put a password on or you can make it private.

Or, you can make a public gallery that has just the public photos in it and a private gallery that has all the photos in it and just share the private gallery with the more limitied audience.

Feel free to share your feature request for individual photo permissions in this thread where it's more likely that the development team will keep track of it.

Packhorse-4

I have to agree with jfriend on this one, there’s definitely more than one way to skin this cat or smug this mug

I have several galleries that are available to everyone who visits my page, but I also use the password for multiple family albums so when my family members sign in with the password, they can visit all of the family albums with that particular password. This is a nice feature because I can have different passwords for different family albums. This way I can share select family pictures with friends and I can share the other family albums with immediate family members.

In addition, I have a few hidden galleries that are not displayed on my home page that I can give access to when I send the gallery link to specific individuals. This way I can take pictures of an event or party and only allow access to the people who were there. Anyone else visiting my site will not even know the pictures are posted.

All in all this is a very slick way to allow different people (family, friends, others) access to my pictures in very specific ways as long as I take a few moments to put my pictures in the appropriate galleries.