Shozam Community

I am sure this has been covered before, but I just couldn't seem to find it. Will there be a way to add password protection to separate albums for clients?

Hi John,

I  don't think we missed anything.  I share your desire for having the ability to control who has access to the galleries.  You must be concerned about this if you are selling people pictures.  No one wants every Tom *** and Jane to be able to peep pictures of their Wedding, High School Senior etc.  Also take into consideratin if these are being offered for sale.  Imagine if a client contacts you with a lawyer stating that their daughter's picture turned up somewhere it shouldn't have.  This is a huge issue.  I can just see the TV ads f"Were your pictures shared online without your permission? Call now to start your law$uit today" 

 I currently use [deleted] and they have password protection.  You can either make up a passphrase question IE: "What city were you married in?"  or a predetermined password can be given to the client.  I like having the option.  Personally, I am shocked that there are so many photographers out there already that do not control access to their client images.  Surethey may have a model release form but does that form say reserve the right to offer their pictures for sale to the www. ?  Not!

I really like Shozam! but without this protection, I'd be limited as to how I could use it.  I hope those guys in Bellevue have beaten me to this by now. They really are an amazing group!  Keep up the good work .. I'm waiting. 

 

Password protection is a function of the server. You can just password protect the directory in which you upload your gallery. Then only viewers with the correct username and password are granted access to the gallery.

There are Web photo services which are "server side" (gallery building happens on the server) and gallery generators which are "client side" (the program resides on your computer). We believe client side is much better for several reasons, like:

• You can switch Web hoting providers at any time and you will not have to rebuild your galleries from scratch
• You do not loose your galleries when your Web photo service goes out of business; see photo sharing sites casualty list
• Uploads happen up to 40x faster, since you do not upload original large images; rather your gallery files are optimized and then uploaded. Our tests have shown that building a gallery of 500 7MB images (originally 2 GB of images) was reduced to a full gallery measuring just 50 MB
• You can have "portable" galleries and burn them to CD, providing another type of product professional photographers can monetize on
• Your galleries work on any Web server and do not depend on any server type functionality
• You can easily integrate galleries into your own Web site
• You have the full freedom to extend your galleries with functionality as you wish and further monetize (e.g. put Google Ads on your gallery pages)

Ask your Web host about setting up a password protected directory and then just upload your gallery at that location. There are some limitations (e.g. you cannot set up password protection on an album by album basis, but rather on a gallery by gallery basis). There are some trade-offs and some may prefer a server side solution. However, if you prefer to be in control of your content and not be locked into a proprietary server side solution, I believe client side generators like Shozam! is the way to go.

Good question on Passwording up galleries.If you are a business and have the ability to have a server rrunning 24/7 you could use  http://www.wfshome.com/

I have been using it for years now with no problems. You can password up folders for others to open by sending them out the password and username. Basically it`s ftp sharing in a very basic form,but Ideal for newcomers to use it`s that simple.

I use it on my own computer about 6 days a week for years with no problems.

So basically you are telling me that you couldn't add an option when you are creating an "Album" in the "Gallery" to have a password protection and when Shozam! creates the "Gallery" it could create the necessary access files so when you upload them to the server they are there. Of course I dont know much about encoding and program writing so I am kind of going out on a limb here.

Shozam! can upload a whole gallery into a password protected directory on the server. Shozam! does not need to "know" that the directory is password protected. Password protection can only be set on the Web server. So it is not Shozam! that does the password-protection; rather you, your Web host or whomever has access to your Web server settings would assign password protection to a designated folder. Any files that a Web viewer would try to access from that folder would prompt the browser to automatically display a pop-up window asking for authentication (username and password).

OK I understand what you mean by client side and server side applications.  I understand that the password stuff is done at the server level but. I don't understand why I can't create the Javascript and include it in my HTML on my end (via Shozam!) and then upload it to the server.  It seems to me once it is uploaded it would fly.  Where am I missing out please?  I am not a programmer by any means - in fact I am all 98% network and a 2% programmer..     

Oops sorry I should have explained my idealogy a bit more. I mean that if I enter the password into a compare function in the javascript included in my html and then upload it,  I did a little digging and found this.  http://atrise-htmlock.atrise-software.qarchive.org/  I don't mean to cause trouble by any means.

I am simply very excited about Shozam! and that you are willing to listen to suggestions.    

You can try it out and post your findings. Shozam allows several way to include custom HTML code on pages related to a specific image (Step 2 --> HTML Tab) or to all gallery pages (Step 5 --> HTML Tab). You can insert JavaScript that way. This may allow you to protect specific pages (or all pages from being displayed without the correct password).

however, a few points:

• From a brief look at the resource you mentioned It may be that users would need to upload additional CGI scripts to the server, which may be too advanced for many Shozam users.
• Also, the method they suggest may need manual intervention after each gallery modification/generation cycle so the pages get encrypted. I don't see that workflow being easy friendly and fast enough for most users
• You would still not be able to contain protection to an album and only an album.

I think that the easiest way to password protect if to do it for a whole gallery and to do it through your Web host's Control Panel by setting a password protected directory. If you decide to run some tests using third party applications please post your findings here so others may benefit from it.

 Let's hope this makes some sense about password protecting a gallery or individual albums. This is information I got from Yahoo (my small business web host). To password my gallery or albums I would need to do this:

1) Create a folder on the server names SSL.

2) Upload my gallery into that folder. Shozam builds subfolders inside the gallery (my gallery name is gallery which also builds the folder named gallery. It also builds subfolders 1, 2, 3, etc for each individual album.

3) To control which albums I can password, supposedly I can pick any folder or subfolder inside the SSL folder and password protect it. I do not have to password all of them or even the SSL folder. So therefore I could password protect gallery/1 or gallery/2 or whatever I choose.

4) This is only an assumption on my part but I believe Yahoo uses Apache server and I assume most web hosts use the same. I would imagine most are set up about the same. Razvan could probably be more detailed about this.

I have tried using some other scripts, cgi etc to password parts of previous websites but found that most lacked some strong security, ie, right click on the page in your browser and choose page source. Bingo, LOGIN AND PASSWORD. If the webpage uses frames it is a bit harder to find the login/password.

Hope this helps and I'm not too far off base with this one. 

3) Then your Gallery Index page will display but any images from the protected album will show red "X" instead of the image, which may not be an acceptable trade-off

4) There are all kinds of servers in use, set up in different ways. If Shozam assumes anything about how the server is set up on the back-end, it will work for some and not for others. If we decide to offer Web hosting in the future, we may offer some features and functionality tied to Shozam servers; otherwise, it is unlikely we would offer functionality which depends on any one Web hosts setup.

The fastest, most secure and  easiest way to protect access to your gallery is to just upload the (whole) gallery in a folder which you have password protected on the server.

While looking for password protection for individual albums, within the same gallery, I saw no direct answer from Razvan.

The example would be a Wedding Photography website with individual clients Albums, some of which I'd like to limit an access to.

Is it difficult, programmatically speaking to incorporate passwording individual Albums into Shozam? Are you looking into it?

Please do not repeat your answer of "The fastest, most secure and  easiest way to protect access to your gallery is to just upload the (whole) gallery in a folder which you have password protected on the server". This means that each individual client would have a gallery of their own and that is not very practical.

 

 

Juraj, I'll clarify a bit the technical reasons for recommending protection only at gallery level.

Password protection on the server needs to be set at the folder level. Password protection on just the album would not work as expected in a Shozam gallery, given the *folder* organization of the gallery files. There is no folder that, if protected, would protect one album and not affect the rest of the gallery. Placing the main album specific folder under password protection would have unintended consequences.

Examples: What would happen to the Gallery Index page? It currently shows thumbnails of all albums. Protecting an album would show rex Xs (image not available type error) on that page, which is likely unacceptable. Same on the main gallery Intro Page, it would not be able to display the thumbnail identifying the album.

Galleries have been designed to be cohesive entities with all images/pages having the same permission level. This is why our recommendation is, for users requiring password protection, to do it at the gallery level. If you have different project/clients which need separate access, create a gallery dedicated to each and have a portal page pointing to each one.