Photo Station Permissions & Sharing

[bkm435]

First, a general thanks again to all of the awesome people here who make and keep this project so fantastic!

 

Last month I upgraded to 5.0-4493 after a very successful year on 4.3. The upgrade was absolutely painless and the system itself has been working perfectly, presuming that I didn't just jinx it by saying that.

 

However, I've been very frustrated with Photo Station and after hours of searching online, I'm amazed that I can't find any clear direction on how to address these issues:

 

Here's my configuration:

- Personal Photo Station option selected for all users

- Photo Station set to use DSM for user management

- While I use the admin account for most global sysadmin needs, I have a separate user account named bkm set up with with full admin privileges. My organized image library is in this account in /homes/bkm/photo.

 

After (re)organizing thousands of photos, I was all psyched to set up family and friends with access to Photo Station and/or to share links to specific photos. Here's where the confusion arises.

 

A) Access permissions: It's apparent to me that I can make certain content public by 1) putting it in the central /photo directory and/or 2) flagging the albums as public. Or 3) I can make it password-protected and make sure people have the PW that I set for each album. I don't want to do #2 or #3 for probably obviously reasons of visibility, management and annoyance. I would prefer not to do #1 for account management and hygiene reasons, though I could get over that.

 

I would think that any user - especially one with admin privs, should be able to mark any album as private and then select the users and groups that can see that album. But in the Photo Station UI, only the actual admin account displays anything in the user and group lists, and even those lists don’t seem to come up consistently from >Settings>Photos>Access Permissions.

 

In DSM, I have only the very coarse options to set permissions to shared folders across groups, or to personal folders for everyone in the groups to which that user (e.g. bkm) belongs. As a further annoyance, if I log directly into Photo Station vs. doing so from DSM or specifying ~admin or ~bkm with the tilde in the URL, there is no content and I can’t even re-log in using the ~ without closing the browser first.

 

1) If I have perhaps 30-40 albums nested within 4-5 album groupings, how do I give specific users or groups access to specific albums when they log into Photo Station?

2) How do those users do the same for any of their own content that they may want to post?

3) Can any user and/or I log directly into Photo Station without changing the complete URL to have the ~username/photo structure?

 

B) Sharing: I would think that if I use the Share option to send someone a link, that link should go directly to that photo and only that photo. Instead, the few times I’ve done that, the recipient seems to go to the top level of my Photo Station account and sees all publicly visible albums.

 

I’ve pounded my head against the screen for countless days trying to figure these things out and have to believe that the answers are staring me in the face. Hopefully those answers are not “you can’t do that.”

 

I’ve tried uninstalling and re-installing Photo Station just in case. That would have been too easy.

 

Any and all help appreciated!