You have several privacy options that can be applied to any gallery, page, or folder on your site. You can mix and match how visible or locked down you want your photos to be by tweaking your Visibility and Access settings.
To make changes to the settings for a gallery, page or folder, click on Settings in the section bar, then on Photo Protection and adjust Access and Visibility options to your preference. Or access the settings for each of those items in the Organizer.
Visibility.
Public (Anyone): Available to the public.
Galleries visible to the public can be seen by anyone who might visit your site. This setting means your site and galleries are also visible to search engines, and the galleries will show up within your own site's navigation. Use this setting to increase your discoverability!
Tip: Want your galleries to be public but still kept out of search engines like Google? Check your Site Search settings.
Unlisted (Anyone with the Link): Hidden from the public.
Unlisted galleries can't be seen by the general public on your SmugMug site and aren't crawled by search engines from within SmugMug. If you share an unlisted URL somewhere, such as social media, it could then be crawled by a search engine.
To share them with a guest, provide a direct link to the gallery. When you do that, it'll look something like this: www.yoursitename.com/gallery/n-Z8xhv
The random scramble of numbers and letters at the end of that link is the "key" that's required to open the unlisted gallery. Without it, we'll just redirect them to your 404 page.
Similar to an unlisted phone number, there's a very small (one in more than a million) chance someone could just type in the right digits and stumble across your gallery. So you can use additional security options described below for more protection.
As the logged-in owner, you'll always know whether or not your gallery's unlisted because we show the status at the top left of the page. For example, this folder is for anyone with the link:
We'll also show the privacy status of folders, galleries, and pages any time you're looking at a thumbnail around your site or in the Organizer:
Private (Only Me): Seen only by you.
Galleries, pages, and folders visible to Only Me are completely private and invisible to the rest of the world. They can only be seen, found, and browsed by the logged-in owner of the site. We don't recommend you use this setting if you plan to share the gallery with anyone.
Important: If you manually select a photo from a private gallery for a content block within the customizer, this image will be visible to logged-out guests. However, this behavior does not apply when you select an entire gallery—only when a specific photo is chosen from the private gallery.
Access.
Anyone.
If you want your photos to be fully explorable, you should set the access to Anyone. Pair this with Public visibility and you’ve got the most discoverable option if you’re wanting to be found.
People with Password.
Maybe you’d like visitors to know you have lots of photos on your site, but you don’t necessarily want them to be able to explore them all. You can lock down access to pages, folders, and galleries by choosing People with Password. Anyone visiting passworded areas won’t be allowed to view any of your content until they enter the correct password—which you set. These galleries don't display any social-sharing options.
Important: The password hint you set will be visible to anyone who visits your site, so we strongly advise you don't make the hint the password itself.
You can mix and match your passworded galleries with other security options. For example, you can make your gallery visible to Anyone + password or even Unlisted + password. If you choose Anyone + password, the gallery will show up in SmugMug's search and Google will know the gallery exists, but it can't look inside.
Important note about passwords: SmugMug does NOT store your gallery passwords in any way that could be leaked (we use an industrial-grade one-way hash), so we recommend you fill in the Hint for Visitors field to help jog your memory if you think you—or your client—might forget. For your extremely important photos that you never want shared, we highly suggest you don't use password reminders at all. Here are great tips on how to create strong passwords.
When our systems detect several incorrect attempts at entering a gallery password, we'll notify you by email. The email will tell you which gallery is the subject of the failed log-in attempts and will provide additional details about the location and time the incorrect passwords were being entered.
We'll only show a generic "lock" icon as the gallery thumbnail to protect your content, but you can choose a featured photo to represent the gallery on your site.
Tip: You can secure your entire SmugMug site with a password, too.
People I Choose.
Have some great candids from a family gathering? Or maybe you want to deliver photos to a client and don’t want any other visitors to find them. Enable Private Sharing by setting your access to People I Choose.
Pages, folders, and galleries available to people you choose are accessible only through invitations you send. And each invite has a unique redemption token. Once your guest uses the invite, no one else can—even if your guest forwards the invitation email on to someone else.
Update Direct Image URLs.
Sharing can be done in several ways. One option is to obtain a direct image URL from the Share panel. This link leads directly to the image itself, not to the gallery or lightbox view. It provides direct access to the image, independent of any view on your site.
Gallery privacy settings do not control the visibility of an image shared with a direct image URL. Instead, these links are controlled by an image signature.
Updating these direct image URLs will invalidate the previous URL by updating the signature within the URL. When this action is taken, previously shared direct image URLs will no longer work. A new URL must be obtained from the Share panel and shared again with a guest when needed.
There are two ways to update a direct image URL:
- Navigate to Gallery Settings > Security & Sharing > Visibility. Change visibility to Private. As you select the private option, you'll then have a chance to update the direct image URLs for all images in that gallery. Use this feature with caution as it's irreversible.
- Contact our support heroes. We can update an image URL signature if needed.
FAQs.
I want a folder to be Unlisted but a gallery within that folder to be Public. Or I want my page to be invite-only but a gallery on it to be Public. Possible?
Yes! Folders and their contents can have different Visibility settings. If you send your visitors a link to an Unlisted folder that has Public galleries, the Public galleries will be displayed. If there are Unlisted or Private galleries in the folder, they won’t be shown to your visitors.
I want a folder to be Private but a gallery in it to be Public. Possible?
Unfortunately, not possible. If a folder's access is Private, everything inside that folder will also be Private. Unlike Unlisted folders, Private folders can’t contain anything other than Private content.
I have an Unlisted folder with Unlisted galleries inside it, but when I send friends a link to the folder, they can't see any of the galleries. What's going on?
Unlisted means your visitors need direct links to each folder, gallery, or page using this Visibility setting. Visitors won't be able to see the galleries because Unlisted galleries can't be seen without a direct link to each gallery. If you’d like to make some of the galleries inside the Unlisted folder visible, just toggle those galleries’ visibility to Public.
Can I set one password for a folder that contains a bunch of galleries?
Yep, use a folder password! While viewing the folder, you can select the Settings button in the section bar and the folder settings window will open. Or in the Organizer, select a folder in the left-hand drawer and click the Settings button. When the folder settings dialog window pops up, change the Security & Sharing settings just like you would for a gallery.
Why doesn't my password-protected gallery require a password anymore?
For convenience, SmugMug will remember you're authorized to visit a gallery once you've correctly entered the password. You can revisit the gallery for up to 24 hours without having to re-enter the password as long as you're using the same computer. Anyone else who visits the gallery for the first time, however, will always be asked for the password.
Ack! I forgot a gallery's password! What do I do?
You won't be able to see a password as a logged-in site owner, but you can reset a gallery's password by following the steps above for setting a password.