The SmugMug Blog

One of the most powerful features on SmugMug are the customizable privacy options found on every gallery in your account. We get a lot of questions from fresh new Smuggers about how this works so here’s a rundown of what those are. We’ll show you how to pick and choose your settings and dial in the perfect amount that suits you best.

Site, Gallery and Photo-level Options

There are three basic ways of protecting your stuff:

SITE-WIDE

The quickest way to stop prying eyes is to add a password to your site. This way, no one can see a thing until they say (well, type) the word.

Just go into your Control Panel‘s Settings tab and look under “Site-Wide Settings.” You’ll see a place to add a site-wide password there.

EACH GALLERY

Privacy come in two flavors: passwords and visibility. You can set a viewing password so anyone who tries to open the gallery will need to enter that password to see any photos. Or, make the gallery Unlisted (our term for “private” or “hidden”) and people browsing your site won’t be able to find it.

These settings aren’t connected so you can have an unlisted, unlocked gallery, a public passworded one, or any combination of the two.

Remember! If you’re the logged-in gallery owner we won’t ask you to enter the viewing password to open your own galleries. But you can always tell that it’s locked by the little yellow lock icon next to the gallery title. Don’t believe us? Log out and hit the link and you’ll see the password prompt.

EACH PHOTO

Generally if you can open a gallery you can see the photos in it, but we’ve included the Hide Photo option just in case you’re unsure something’s fit for consumption. Find that checkbox under the image when you’re using the SmugMug viewing style, and only you will see that photo when logged in as the gallery owner. (Power and Pro Smuggers: Don’t do this for useful site images like your banner or watermark!)

Tip: While there isn’t a Category or Sub-category level password, you can set the same password on every gallery in a Category if you wish. We can sense when you do this and  – voilà! – automagically unlock all galleries with the same password after your guest has entered it once.

What Are SmugIslands?

You can also opt out of internet searches (like Google) and out of SmugMug’s search results for when people use the search box in our header.  This is the idea behind SmugIslands and it makes your site hidden away like your own private retreat. Set it for your whole site from the Settings tab in your Control Panel.

If you ever change your mind and want specific galleries to be found, toggle the Hello World or Hello Smuggers option to “No”  in that gallery’s Settings page. That overrides whatever you set in your Control Panel, just for that gallery.

Remember that flipping the switch either way and going from private to public (or vice versa) takes time, so be patient and wait a few days before worrying you did something wrong!

More Stuff: Sharegroups

If you’re keen on sharing a group of galleries with special protections, try Sharegroups. You can pick which galleries belong in the group and we’ll save a special place on your site where people can click once and see them all. The link is only visible to the people you share it with, but you can apply an additional viewing password to the whole group just to be safe. Check it out here.

Events and Favorites work a similar way with a few additional features, so if you have a Pro account, give that a try, too.

Going Public

On the flip side, we have lots of other great features for people who want to be found. Check out this page with tips on maximizing your search engine mojo, and see what other things you can do to market yourself to potential customers.

Privacy Checklist

To sum up:

• If you don’t want anyone but your friends to see your site, use a site-wide password.
• If you want just special folks to see a gallery, make it unlisted or add a viewing password.
• If you want to make just a few photos private for your eyes only, click Hide Photo.
• If you don’t want to be found on Google, set Hello World! to No.
• If you don’t want to be found in SmugMug searches, set Hello Smuggers! to No.

Enjoy, and remember to check out our help center if you’ve got questions we haven’t answered. Or better yet, drop us a note. We’d love to hear from you.