This is exactly my concern as well. It's just like educated url guessing, right Don? My biggest piracy worries are with the "professional" pirates strip mining a whole library of photos. I have not knowingly run into this animal yet, but I would not want to run in to him or her in the future either. I also would like think your customers should be able to accept that they simply can not direct link to password protected photos, that is just common sense. If someone can't take a simple "you can't dlink to photos in password protected galleries" note from cutomer support, I would not have a clue as to why not. Everyone should be thankful for not being able to dlink to password protected images. I really do think reconsidering the stronger password protection issue here at smugmug is worth your time and troubles. I realize this is a tough and delicate area, but password protection seems to be a pretty strong term for images that are not really password protected.
-don
It may seem like common sense to you, but I assure you, it's not to most of our customers.
We often make decisions "for the greater good" and this is one of those times. You CAN link to Passworded galleries for all sorts of good reasons. One is that you may want to post a photo to a forum and not have it publicly displayed on your site. It happens all the time, this particular need.
I'm sorry, but I've heard everyone's arguments and they just don't carry enough weight. We got, until this thread, ZERO complaints about this issue. Not few, literally none. When Passworded galleries worked differently, we got lots of complaints. In that light, this really isn't a difficult decision. We don't purport to be the end-all-be-all of security and privacy, and we like it that way. Easy trumps Security at smugmug if there's a collision. We generally try to do both extremely well, but this is one of those cases. If that's a problem, you might want to consider going elsewhere.
As I said, we'll continue to think about the feature and talk about it amongst ourselves, but merely "guessing" a URL by incrementing or guessing ImageIDs isn't scary enough or important enough to work on. As long as your whole gallery is passworded, there's not even a starting image to start guessing from. Finally, if you use any of the "modern" smugmug uploaders, such as Star*Explorer, your photos won't even be sequential. They'll be interleaved with other people's photos.
I'm closing this thread since it's degenerated into me asking "well, how do you get passworded images without guessing" and replies that basically say "here's how to guess them". Open another one if you have something important to add that's not related to guessing image #s.
Comments
It may seem like common sense to you, but I assure you, it's not to most of our customers.
We often make decisions "for the greater good" and this is one of those times. You CAN link to Passworded galleries for all sorts of good reasons. One is that you may want to post a photo to a forum and not have it publicly displayed on your site. It happens all the time, this particular need.
I'm sorry, but I've heard everyone's arguments and they just don't carry enough weight. We got, until this thread, ZERO complaints about this issue. Not few, literally none. When Passworded galleries worked differently, we got lots of complaints. In that light, this really isn't a difficult decision. We don't purport to be the end-all-be-all of security and privacy, and we like it that way. Easy trumps Security at smugmug if there's a collision. We generally try to do both extremely well, but this is one of those cases. If that's a problem, you might want to consider going elsewhere.
As I said, we'll continue to think about the feature and talk about it amongst ourselves, but merely "guessing" a URL by incrementing or guessing ImageIDs isn't scary enough or important enough to work on. As long as your whole gallery is passworded, there's not even a starting image to start guessing from. Finally, if you use any of the "modern" smugmug uploaders, such as Star*Explorer, your photos won't even be sequential. They'll be interleaved with other people's photos.
I'm closing this thread since it's degenerated into me asking "well, how do you get passworded images without guessing" and replies that basically say "here's how to guess them". Open another one if you have something important to add that's not related to guessing image #s.
Don