Private Albums

jgodfrey

Hi All,

Though I've seen a few discussions of private albums here on the forum, I've never seen or heard anything official about them. Checking the roadmap on the wiki, I don't see any mention of them.

So Tris, what is the *official* word? Is it something you expect ZenPhoto to support at some point, and if so - do you have it targeted for any specific version?

For my (basic) gallery needs, this is about the only thing currently missing in ZP.

Thanks for any additional input (and for ZP).

Jeff

adhingra

I've thought about that as well. However, I'm going to figure out how to do it in my CMS (Wordpress), then allow access to one of two groups: public and private.

Each group will get a "page" in WP, and I'll figure out how to arrange that in WP -- I'm sure it's in there somewhere. Then, each page will contain some query code to ZP for some albums.

I have no idea how to write php yet, so it's gonna take me a lot of studying and swearing. But architecturally I think this makes more sense.

Of course, if you're hosting ONLY ZP, I'm sure it's more of a pressing need. But, perhaps you can think of jamming it into Wordpress or something similar, which seems to be the prevailing trend.

jgodfrey

Because I run my own web server I could easily manage folder access (and therefore album access) at the server level, except that the ZP cache folder is in a different branch of the folder tree...

While I'm sure there's a good reason for the current organization, it would seem to be easier to manage private folders if the cache for each album was stored as a sub-folder beneath the album itself.

I guess one other option would be to run 2 separate instances of ZP - one for public photos and one for private photos. Although, since I have various sets of private photos (private to different people), that's not a complete solution either...

Thoughts?

Jeff

jgodfrey

Hi Tristan,

Any input on this thread?

Thanks,

Jeff

trisweb

Hey Jeff, missed it completely, thanks for bringing it back up.

It would be much easier to have a password field in the database and an interface to password-protect albums and images. The image loop would then just check the album object, and display a password box instead of the page of images if a password exists.

So, a couple implementation questions, just to get an idea of what you would like.

1) Global password with a 'this album is private' checkbox, or a password field for each album?

2) Are Images under protected albums inaccessible too? Or just the album in the UI?

3) Should processed images be restricted as well? That's much harder though, and would limit you from doing things like using an image from a protected album in a blog post, etc. I think this is unnecessary.

4) Should there be Image-level protection or just Album-level? I think Album-only would simplify things, and force people to make albums that are grouped by access level, which makes much more sense for the people viewing the gallery.

Let me know what you think on those, that's a quick implementation, so let's say it'll be in 1.1.

jgodfrey

Tristan,

Thanks for the reply. Regarding your questions...

1. In my case, I'd need to be able to assign a unique password to each album, as each album may need to be viewed by a different group of people...

2. I'm not sure I follow this one. I think you're asking if the the album UI in ZP could be the password protected "gatekeeper" (so to speak) without having to further protect the lower-level images? I guess the difference being that if someone had a specific image URL, they could still go directly there and bypass the "gatekeeper"? If that's the case, I'd prefer that the images were not accessible individually either, though that would seem to be a tougher problem. Only protecting the UI access would certainly go a long ways for me. (Or did I miss this one completely?)...

3. Sorry, I don't follow this one either. I'm not sure what a "processed" image is... Without more info, I'd guess that your "unnecessary" assumption is accurate...

4. Album-level protection is OK in my case.

Again, thanks for considering this addition, and for ZP in general.

Jeff

ontelo

To keep this gallery simple I suggest that:
- There wouldn't be users (to set different permissions)
- Only simple password would be needed to access album.

jgodfrey

@ontelo - that works for me. ;^)

Jeff

trisweb

Yep, you guys agreed with everything I said, which was a complicated way to outline the simple obvious solution.

I'll do it. Thanks for your feedback!

jgodfrey

That's great Tristan. Thanks again.

Jeff

preckie

how's this going so far?

xebeque

me so noisy ;-)