don't want photos to be public

yahootintin · February 4, 2005

hi,

i'm a new smugmug user and am very excited about using it. i want anyone who goes to my album to be able to view the photos but i don't want the photos to show up in the global keyword search.

is there a way to remove my photos from the global keyword search without making my albums private?

thanks!

Baldy · February 5, 2005

Hey Yahootintin,

Welcome!

The answer to your question, unfortunately, is know if I understand it correctly. Is what you're looking for to have your albums show up to to your visitors when they come to your home page but not be found in global search?

Thanks,
Baldy

jberd126 · March 28, 2005

Baldy,

I have the same question. Is it possible to have my albums/photos not show up in the global searches without making them all private? I would still like them to be searchable but only from my personal home page. Could this be done with a setting on the album's configuration page?

Thanks!
-J

Baldy wrote:

The answer to your question, unfortunately, is know if I understand it correctly. Is what you're looking for to have your albums show up to to your visitors when they come to your home page but not be found in global search?

Thanks,
Baldy

Baldy · March 28, 2005

Hey J,

Welcome! We get asked this from time to time and the current answer is no, but let me talk to the crew here and see how hard a feature that might be. I suppose a global setting would be nice, no?

Thanks,
Baldy

yahootintin · March 28, 2005

A global setting would be great for me!

Something like:
[X] Exclude your Keywords from Smugmug Keyword list

Thanks!

Baldy wrote:

Hey J,

Welcome! We get asked this from time to time and the current answer is no, but let me talk to the crew here and see how hard a feature that might be. I suppose a global setting would be nice, no?

Thanks,
Baldy

jberd126 · March 28, 2005

A global setting would work perfect for me as well. I think that many personal users could find this feature desirable. Thank you in advance for implementing it!

-J

jberd126 · April 21, 2005

Not to press, but is the non-global keyword option something that has a chance of being implemented?

-J

onethumb · April 22, 2005

jberd126 wrote:

Not to press, but is the non-global keyword option something that has a chance of being implemented?

-J

Here at smugmug, everything has a chance of being implemented, so your answer is yes.

This is an interesting question, and might not be too difficult to do, but let me make sure I understand correctly:

You want an option in each gallery that, if the gallery is set to public, you can still restrict keywords to your homepage, and not the global site?

What about full-text searching? Do you want that disabled globally, too, or just keywords?

Do you want us to tell Google not to index it, either, or do you want Google to still index?

Any other gotchas you can think of?

Don

jberd126 · April 22, 2005

Thanks for replying Don.

The purpose of this request is to keep my personal photo galleries more private. I love the search capabilities that smugmug supplies but I would like to have it restricted to just my site. I would prefer not to have my photos or galleries in global searches of keywords or captions not have it listed in the Google index.

onethumb wrote:

Here at smugmug, everything has a chance of being implemented, so your answer is yes.

This is an interesting question, and might not be too difficult to do, but let me make sure I understand correctly:

You want an option in each gallery that, if the gallery is set to public, you can still restrict keywords to your homepage, and not the global site?

What about full-text searching? Do you want that disabled globally, too, or just keywords?

Do you want us to tell Google not to index it, either, or do you want Google to still index?

Somewhat correct. For myself, the simplest is to have a single checkbox for my account that restrict keywords and caption searching only to my homepage (i.e. all public galleries in my account). Google would also not index my pages.

A single site-wide option would be simplest but I could live with the option on a per-gallery basis.

onethumb wrote:

Any other gotchas you can think of?

New and old galleries should default to global searching (i.e. what it currently is).

I find it great that smugmug actually listens and works with the community to improve the business.

-J

4thinker · April 22, 2005

onethumb wrote:

Here at smugmug, everything has a chance of being implemented, so your answer is yes.

This is an interesting question, and might not be too difficult to do, but let me make sure I understand correctly:

You want an option in each gallery that, if the gallery is set to public, you can still restrict keywords to your homepage, and not the global site?

What about full-text searching? Do you want that disabled globally, too, or just keywords?

Do you want us to tell Google not to index it, either, or do you want Google to still index?

Any other gotchas you can think of?

Don

Don, thank you for looking at this. This issue is the one reason I am considering leaving Smugmug. I can't have my family's photos searchable by Google or any other sites on the web. I've never liked the fact that I have no control over that. The new keywords feature is cool, except that it was turned on without me knowing about it and it got my Smugmug site indexed by Google using my last name.

Now all anyone needs to do to see my family's private photos is to Google me. I'm not happy about that at all. I'd love to see a global setting that allows me to control whether Google and other search engines can index my galleries.

In the mean time, is there a way for me to change Smugmug usernames without having my old URL point to my new one?

Baldy · April 23, 2005

4thinker wrote:

In the mean time, is there a way for me to change Smugmug usernames without having my old URL point to my new one?

Good feedback, 4thinker.

As far as changing your username goes, the way it works is a nickname that cannot be found because it doesn't exist anymore gets directed to our home page, not to your new nickname. So if you change your nickname, you shoud be golden.

I hope this helps.

Thanks,
Baldy

onethumb · April 24, 2005

4thinker wrote:

Don, thank you for looking at this. This issue is the one reason I am considering leaving Smugmug. I can't have my family's photos searchable by Google or any other sites on the web. I've never liked the fact that I have no control over that. The new keywords feature is cool, except that it was turned on without me knowing about it and it got my Smugmug site indexed by Google using my last name.

Now all anyone needs to do to see my family's private photos is to Google me. I'm not happy about that at all. I'd love to see a global setting that allows me to control whether Google and other search engines can index my galleries.

In the mean time, is there a way for me to change Smugmug usernames without having my old URL point to my new one?

Note, please, that we cannot tell Google or other search engines what to do. If you can view a page, Google can view a page, and thus, index it for all to see.

We can give it hints, but how well/quickly/accurately it follows those hints is up to Google - they're not going to pay attention to small fry like us if there's some sort of problem.

So this feature, should it happen, is definitely not foolproof. Google may very well index your stuff even if we tell it not to every way we know.

Just wanted to be clear here.

Don

4thinker · April 24, 2005

onethumb wrote:

Note, please, that we cannot tell Google or other search engines what to do. If you can view a page, Google can view a page, and thus, index it for all to see.

We can give it hints, but how well/quickly/accurately it follows those hints is up to Google - they're not going to pay attention to small fry like us if there's some sort of problem.

So this feature, should it happen, is definitely not foolproof. Google may very well index your stuff even if we tell it not to every way we know.

Just wanted to be clear here.

Don

I know that you don't have absolute control over whether Google indexes pages or not. On the other hand, I've never had Google index a page when I've used one of the standard methods for directing browsers not to index (such as putting it in the robots.txt file or using the "No index, no follow" META tag).

4thinker · April 24, 2005

Baldy wrote:

Good feedback, 4thinker.

As far as changing your username goes, the way it works is a nickname that cannot be found because it doesn't exist anymore gets directed to our home page, not to your new nickname. So if you change your nickname, you shoud be golden.

I hope this helps.

Thanks,
Baldy

I tried changing my username on Friday. It's now Sunday evening and you can view my pictures at both http://oldusername.smugmug.com and http://newusername.smugmug.com. Did something go wrong or does it just take a while for the old username to phase out?

Baldy · April 25, 2005

Can you email help with your olde and new nicknames? I'd like to see what's happening.

Thanks,
Baldy

4thinker · April 25, 2005

Baldy wrote:

Can you email help with your olde and new nicknames? I'd like to see what's happening.

Thanks,
Baldy

Thanks for looking in to it. I've emailed Ben with the old and new usernames.

g1r2e3g · April 26, 2005

Privacy - Yes Please!
Hi All,

I'd also like to see some global searching and indexing controls placed on galleries. To be completely honest I wouldn't have stumped up my $50 if i'd known i'd be forced into some sort of international show and tell.

Can I suggest the follow security levels:

*Full Public ( as it is now )
- Gallery visible on users homepage
- Allow keyword and caption searching via smugmug.com
- Allow full search engine indexing

* Part Public ( new! )
- Gallery visible on users homepage
- Keywords, Captions, Username, Titles NOT searchable via smugmug.com
- No Index, No Follow Meta Data added to gallery pages

* Private ( as it is now )
- Gallery visible only via direct URL with password
- Keywords and Captions NOT searchable via smugmug.com
- No Index, No Follow Meta Data added to gallery pages

I realy feel that this is a "must have" feature for smugmug. If the site was free then fair enough, but for $50 a year I'd like to have a little privacy. If I had kids and wanted to put their pics up I think I would have defitinely demanded a refund by now. I just assumed that because its not a free site, that some sort of privacy would have been an option.

Thanks for taking note though Baldy & co, it is great to be part of a site that does listen to its customers.

Greg

Baldy · April 26, 2005

4thinker wrote:

Thanks for looking in to it. I've emailed Ben with the old and new usernames.

It looks like your nicknames get cached (remembered) for some time after you change them. We're looking into how hard it would be to change this.

victor · April 27, 2005

Google *will* honour the robots.txt exclusion file

4thinker wrote:

I know that you don't have absolute control over whether Google indexes pages or not. On the other hand, I've never had Google index a page when I've used one of the standard methods for directing browsers not to index (such as putting it in the robots.txt file or using the "No index, no follow" META tag).

Use of robots.txt to block unwanted crawler activity has been around for a long time.

Google state quite clearly that they won't crawl/index a site if robots.txt is present and set up correctly ... http://www.google.com/webmasters/faq.html#nocrawl. Yahoo also say something similar ... http://help.yahoo.com/us/ysearch/deletions/deletions-03.html

Those are the only two I've checked out but I suspect that most reputable search engines will honour robots.txt. Of course, if your pages/images have already been indexed by the big boys, then it's a bit late for this.

victor · April 27, 2005

removing pages from Google's index

victor wrote:

Of course, if your pages/images have already been indexed by the big boys, then it's a bit late for this.

I was wrong, Google does offer a way for sites like SM to remove indexed pages. See http://www.google.com/remove.html

"[the removal options] [size=-1]take effect the next time Google crawls your site, which is usually within six to eight weeks."
[/size]

Byam · April 27, 2005

If it could be set that keywords could only be searched locally and not globally over smugmug.com would that make it possible to use keywords on private galleries?

Is there anyway that on my homepage where keywords would normally be seen that a password box could be placed there and only after someone entered a password they could view my keywords? Would that allow me to use keywords on private galleries? I would LOVE to use keywords to make it eaiser for my friends and family to find pictures on my site but I also want to keep them private too.

Byam

jberd126 · May 15, 2005

Don,

I don't want to become on of those annoying posters but I think this feature would be important for a moderate number of general Smugmug users. Myself and others have stated that they require this feature.

Can you drop a hint on whether this item is one the priority list to being , or even on the list at all?

Flame away.
-J

onethumb · May 15, 2005

jberd126 wrote:

Don,

I don't want to become on of those annoying posters but I think this feature would be important for a moderate number of general Smugmug users. Myself and others have stated that they require this feature.

Can you drop a hint on whether this item is one the priority list to being , or even on the list at all?

Flame away.
-J

I respect and listen to everyone's opinion here on dgrin. It's incredibly valuable to us, but it's not 100% of what we base our decisions on.

The way the search engine is set up, this is impossible. Not difficult - impossible. We'd have to re-write search for 21,000,000+ images to make this happen.

Search is difficult. We have to scale to searching billions of images. Exceptions like this cause both slowdowns and complexity.

Finally, we take security and privacy seriously, and there are some serious implications here that are, at best, shaky to think about.

So, while I hate to be the bearer of bad news, this isn't on our todo list. It's unlikely to ever happen. Private galleries are *private*, that's what the option is for.

Don

jberd126 · May 17, 2005

Don,
Thank you for writing back about this topic. I understand you are busy and are probably working on a thousand issues but please read this slowly.

onethumb wrote:

I respect and listen to everyone's opinion here on dgrin. It's incredibly valuable to us, but it's not 100% of what we base our decisions on.

Of course of course. There are many other factors to take into account.

onethumb wrote:

The way the search engine is set up, this is impossible. Not difficult - impossible. We'd have to re-write search for 21,000,000+ images to make this happen.

Search is difficult. We have to scale to searching billions of images. Exceptions like this cause both slowdowns and complexity.

Finally, we take security and privacy seriously, and there are some serious implications here that are, at best, shaky to think about.

So, while I hate to be the bearer of bad news, this isn't on our todo list. It's unlikely to ever happen. Private galleries are *private*, that's what the option is for.

I hope I'm not annoying you (the preceeding remarks allude to this). :cry The answer you gave makes me think that you may be getting the request confused with something else because it makes little sense to me.

The question:

Is it possible to have public albums without Smugmug distributing the image's metadata to it's own and external search engines.

The solution that is proposed is to make the albums private. This would of course would be one answer but at the expense that only people that have links to the albums or sharegroups would be able to access them. It also destroys the tree structure.

Does making all my albums private change much in the underlying search algorithm? It's a flag, right? Search or don't search the album images based on whether or not it's private. What I'm proposing is to add a qualifier flag that determines whether or not to search public albums, such as 'allowSearch'

Show images when (...) [Same as currently implemented]

Search images when (... and allowSearch is true) [Modification]

The granularity of 'allowSearch' is up to you - whether it's account-wide or album-specific.I'm not trying to create a war. I'm one person but I'm willing to make a bet that if you polled your customers whom have personal accounts whether or not they would want (or require) this ability you would get a resonable response in the affirmative.

-J

onethumb · May 17, 2005

jberd126 wrote:

Don,
Thank you for writing back about this topic. I understand you are busy and are probably working on a thousand issues but please read this slowly.

Of course of course. There are many other factors to take into account.

I hope I'm not annoying you (the preceeding remarks allude to this). :cry The answer you gave makes me think that you may be getting the request confused with something else because it makes little sense to me.

The question:
Is it possible to have public albums without Smugmug distributing the image's metadata to it's own and external search engines.
The solution that is proposed is to make the albums private. This would of course would be one answer but at the expense that only people that have links to the albums or sharegroups would be able to access them. It also destroys the tree structure.

Does making all my albums private change much in the underlying search algorithm? It's a flag, right? Search or don't search the album images based on whether or not it's private. What I'm proposing is to add a qualifier flag that determines whether or not to search public albums, such as 'allowSearch'

Show images when (...) [Same as currently implemented]

Search images when (... and allowSearch is true) [Modification]

The granularity of 'allowSearch' is up to you - whether it's account-wide or album-specific.I'm not trying to create a war. I'm one person but I'm willing to make a bet that if you polled your customers whom have personal accounts whether or not they would want (or require) this ability you would get a resonable response in the affirmative.

-J

Nope, this isn't the way it works. It used to, but the scalability issue is going to get so large that this is no longer the case.

An album or image either exists in the search engine or it doesn't exist in the search engine. There's no other flags or data, because super-fast search results (which we currently deliver for only some results, and we want to deliver for all results) is the goal. Reducing complexity increases speed.

Just so I'm clear, how would you want allowSearch to work? Something like this?

if($public == true && $allowSearch == false) {
$noSearch = true;
}
elseif($public == false && $allowSearch == true) {
$noSearch = false;
}
elseif($public == false && $allowSearch == false) {
$noSearch = true;
}
elseif($public == true && $allowSearch == true) {
$noSearch = false;
}

Or would you rather have allowSearch *only* disable searching, but never enable it?

We'll keep thinking about the issue, but it's a complex one that has long-term ramifications. We can't rapidly make changes to our dataset anymore because it's getting too large.

Don

jberd126 · May 17, 2005

Wow - quick responses. Impressed.

onethumb wrote:

Just so I'm clear, how would you want allowSearch to work? Something like this?

The global allowSearch parameter that I've defined would be a qualifer to public albums. Private albums would remain as they are - unsearchable - irregardless of this flag. You can short-cut the if statements with simple boolean logic:

$noSearch = not($public and $allowSearch)

where $public must be true AND $allowSearch must both be true to search (otherwise searching is not done):

$noSearch = not(true and true) = false

I would assume allowSearch would default to 'true' for all current and new users so that functionality is not changed. If users want to disable searching they would override this option.

onethumb wrote:

We'll keep thinking about the issue, but it's a complex one that has long-term ramifications. We can't rapidly make changes to our dataset anymore because it's getting too large.

Yes, I can image that your dataset is getting quite large. I was looking through the API and from the outside it looks like most of the album parameters are either secuity/permissions or display formatting. Preventing changes to your dataset will cause you to be psuedo-feature locked.

-J

jberd126 · September 9, 2005

Ability to isolate gallery from external searches
I think I've been very patient on this subject but I've seen only a little interest from Smugmug, and that was FOUR months ago. I like Smugmug and recommend it to friends but I feel that they're more interested in rolling out new features.

I to put it bluntly I want Smugmug to support the ability to turn off (1) search engine indexing and (2) searching of my photos from the main site or from other people's galleries. I would still want to be able to search my photos from within my gallery though.

I just don't want my stuff broadcast to the world and make it more isolated.

Does anyone else feel that same?

jfriend · September 9, 2005

I agree

jberd126 wrote:

I to put it bluntly I want Smugmug to support the ability to turn off (1) search engine indexing and (2) searching of my photos from the main site or from other people's galleries. I would still want to be able to search my photos from within my gallery though.

I just don't want my stuff broadcast to the world.

Does anyone else feel that same?

I agree. I do not want my galleries searchable on Google at all (or any other search engine), but I don't want to have to password protect them or my whole site to stop Google indexing because that's too much of an obstacle for eacy sharing with extended family and friends whom I want to be able to use my site without difficulty.

--John

Mike Lane · September 9, 2005

jberd126 wrote:

I think I've been very patient on this subject but I've seen only a little interest from Smugmug, and that was FOUR months ago. I like Smugmug and recommend it to friends but I feel that they're more interested in rolling out new features.

I to put it bluntly I want Smugmug to support the ability to turn off (1) search engine indexing and (2) searching of my photos from the main site or from other people's galleries. I would still want to be able to search my photos from within my gallery though.

I just don't want my stuff broadcast to the world and make it more isolated.

Does anyone else feel that same?

If you're a pro you can prevent indexing to your galleries by hacking the smugmug cobranding. Put the following in your stylesheet html box at the very top:

</style>

 <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX">

<style type="text/css">

jfriend · September 9, 2005

Tried that, not sure if it will always work

Mike Lane wrote:
If you're a pro you can prevent indexing to your galleries by hacking the smugmug cobranding. Put the following in your stylesheet html box at the very top:
 </style>
 
  <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX">
 
 <style type="text/css">

I have done that already. I don't know how well it will work thought because this just leads to conflicting META tags. The first tag, supplied by smugmug is:
<meta name="robots" content="all, index, follow" /> I then add mine (which smugmug places after it's own):
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW">

The specs I read don't specify what a robot is supposed to do
if it encounters two conflicting tags or whether it even keeps
looking for another meta tag once it's found the first one.

--John

gblotter · September 10, 2005

very serious topic - please keep discussion going
I am very interested in this topic as well. In this thread, others have well articulated my privacy issues/desires. I will only add that I believe this is a shared concern for many smugmug loyalists.

I don't want to encumber access with account passwords or private galleries. But I do want to localize the use of keywords and captions within my account (hide the visibility of keywords and captions from Google searches and smugmug global searches). This is what I call the "semi-private" option. I think this is what we are all talking about here.

Through experimentation, I have discovered that enabling an account password does not accomplish this goal. My keywords and captions are still visible to Google searches and smugmug global searches even with an account password enabled. An account password seems to be effective only for restricting access through the front door. Backdoor access remains wide open via direct URL from Google.

From what I can tell, hiding keywords and captions from Google searches and smugmug global searches is only possible by creating private galleries. For me, that kinda defeats the whole purpose of photo sharing.

onethumb wrote:

So, while I hate to be the bearer of bad news, this isn't on our todo list. It's unlikely to ever happen. Private galleries are *private*, that's what the option is for.

Given this unfortunate reality, I am very interested to learn about any partial solutions. If re-writing smugmug search functionality is not possible because of complexity and volume issues, can we at least hide keywords and captions from Google searches via robot meta tags as mentioned in the previous post? Does smugmug search rely upon the same robot crawler functionality as Google search? Let's keep this discussion going please to learn how Google cloaking might be accomplished.

don't want photos to be public

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