Limiting Viewing Size

Packhorse-4

Hello fellow Smuggers – I have a question about limiting the maximum viewing size for visitors to my Smugmug page (I’m thinking Medium) but at the same time having the ability to post large images on forums.

My thinking is this, by limiting the viewing size in my galleries to Medium; I can deter casual downloading of my pictures by only allowing access to a relatively small image. However, when I want to post an image in a forum for critique I would like to have the image larger and of higher quality.

If I limit the viewing size of the gallery, do I also limit the maximum size of the file I can link to a forum?

jfriend

Packhorse-4 wrote:

Hello fellow Smuggers – I have a question about limiting the maximum viewing size for visitors to my Smugmug page (I’m thinking Medium) but at the same time having the ability to post large images on forums.

My thinking is this, by limiting the viewing size in my galleries to Medium; I can deter casual downloading of my pictures by only allowing access to a relatively small image. However, when I want to post an image in a forum for critique I would like to have the image larger and of higher quality.

If I limit the viewing size of the gallery, do I also limit the maximum size of the file I can link to a forum?

As best I know, you can't have your cake and eat it to in the same gallery. Smugmug could block the UI for showing larges and still let you use them in forum postings, but then anybody who knew how Smugmug works could get at your larges just by typing the URL to the large size image. This would not be what most customers want when they block larges. So, when larges are disabled from the UI, they are fully disabled. Nobody can get to them.

What I do to solve this problem is to create a private gallery (not browsable by the public) for my forum postings. If there's an image in a public gallery that doesn't have the size I want available for a forum posting, I just make a copy of the image and move it to the private gallery I use for forum postings (can all be done without re-uploading). Then, the browsable gallery has the restrictive settings, but you have a private copy (with large size available) you can use in forum postings.

Packhorse-4

jfriend wrote:

What I do to solve this problem is to create a private gallery (not browsable by the public) for my forum postings. If there's an image in a public gallery that doesn't have the size I want available for a forum posting, I just make a copy of the image and move it to the private gallery I use for forum postings (can all be done without re-uploading). Then, the browsable gallery has the restrictive settings, but you have a private copy (with large size available) you can use in forum postings.

Well, that was easy... Why didn't I think of that???

Thanks for the help!