Hello all,
I need to know what the best stacks are for creating a photo gallery that has password protection. I need to be able to upload photos from and iPhone into a gallery online. That gallery needs to be password protected so only certain people have access. What do you suggest for this?
Thanks
Thanks for the suggestion. I looked at it. I’m hoping for more of a drop box or gallery that you can upload to. One that is password-protected. I need to be able to upload from my phone.
For the password protected galleries, any kind of page protection with a combination of a gallery being able to read images from a folder:
Apologies if I have this wrong; Are you asking for a gallery that only certain people can LOOK at, or are you asking for a method to allow certain people to ADD to a gallery ?
If the latter then just create one or more additional FTP userids on your web-host and restrict their access to the specific folder that holds the images.
Then provide them with the settings to access your site and they can upload from their phones/cameras.
I am looking for a gallery that family members can upload to, and that is also password-protected. I might just go with shared albums in iCloud. Not sure yet.
Any gallery and lock the page with PageSafe.
Really, Instacks User Access, Repository and his amazing Gallery 3 stack do precisely what you need. I use all three of them and they are flawless. Moreover, Gallery 3 stack is very versatile, you can create a folder for thumbnails, so people do not need to waste bandwidth on loading a page with huge photos. And it is so easy to upload both thumbnails and the photos themselves via Repository. Repository is also compatible with User Access, with a special setting for when using User Access.
My only problem with buying these three stacks is that they are so expensive. Quite a bit more than Rapidweaver itself when bought together. Thank you for the suggestions. I will keep thinking about it. It is just for a family website and I don’t know if we want to sink that much money into it.
There are some alternatives … but realistically you are asking for a lot (uploading, privacy, gallery) which … in the end … requires some sort of combination of 3 stacks. Or needs users to be very tech savvy (which I’m guessing the intended users aren’t). For example, you could use Sitelok instead of PageSafe. Or Shutter instead of Gallery 3. And so on. But the total price would be about the same.
However, a combination of privacy, gallery, uploading stacks are great to have in your toolkit. If you make other kinds of websites then it seems a useful purchase. If you’d only use for this one website … I guess it depends on how much you care about the family. :)
One argument I’d make against doing what your doing is most users (including some web developers) use images that are way way way too big for websites. (I probably should put in 2-3 more “ways”.) And this causes all sorts of problems. So realistically it’s probably better that folks send you images somewhow, then you optimize and put on the website. That would reduce your costs/investment by quite a lot.
I know what you are suggesting doing sounds simple and attractive … but it is full of pain points beyond the costs of the stacks themselves.
It might be useful to purchase Gallery 3 (a great stack) and consider alternatives for receiving the images. That brings down the price quite a bit, and Gallery is a very useful stack to have in your toolkit.
If you don’t need to embed the gallery into a website (made with RW), there are loads of open source gallery solutions out there, that will do exactly what you want. I use Piwigo, but there are others.
Repository Stack is able to reduce the image size during upload as optional setting.
Yes, I see. I think I can give you a “Photo CMS” bundle price for all 3 (and include another still unreleased gallery stack) if you’re interested. Which at the end might be still too much for what you want to achieve. Let me know if you’re interested, so that I can set up this bundle.
Yikes, I completely forgot that Repository does that! My apologies.
@Parker Repository is such a versatile stack: I use it (for differing reasons) on every website I develop.
These are all very good suggestions and I thank you all very much for them. I think the family members are worried a website is too complicated. Not sure what we are going to do. I might buy Repository for another project I am working on. It does look like a very useful stack.
Repository is excellent. Another feature which often gets overlooked, and is super handy if using it to populate Gallery3 galleries, is the “create thumbnails” feature.
One click and it will create thumbnails of all the images in a folder, and put them neatly in a sun folder called “thumbs”.
Meaning Galley 3 will use thumbnails or the list view, so making pages load faster.
It’s a killer feature.
@TemplateRepo @Jannis I hadn’t used the thumbnails feature of Repository. Just tried it out and it half works for me: creates a thumb folder and image inside. But image inside is same size/dimensions as original image. Bug? Or am I doing something wrong?
My test folder contained one image but several other types of non-image files. Perhaps that is the problem? All images need to be images? I asked for thumbs at 400 x 400.
It works only for jpg files.
@Jannis Ah … got it! Thanks.
Does it work only on JPGs because the assumption is that’s what will be used for galleries? Or is there a technical issue/obstacle to doing the thumbnails on PNGs as well?
Hi @Parker , I think I know where you are coming from. Shared folders in iCloud is cheap and cheerful and in my experience with my own family, secure and simple - so long as I was at the centre of the workflow. And it is not that fast. The advice here on applicable stacks is spot on and based on the advice of these guys and others in this forum, I have purchased most of these stacks and used in my websites (amateur, non profit volunteer contributor) - they provide a level of control and optimisation you will just not see in iCloud. But they have a learning curve and much of the power is hidden from view - which is why this forum is such a precious resource for me and others who are assisted by the professional RW guys out there.