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I am a fairly new user of smugmug and am loving it. One thing I was trying to do, but could not find out is how to make categories/sub-categories unlisted.

Is this possible? I tried looking through the help documents for how to accomplish this and could not find it. Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

The use case: Photos of an event organized into galleries within a category. Then I can share a link to the category with a bunch of unlisted gallies for them to have access to.

Example: Let us say I am taking pictures with a category of "Wedding" and then have galleries listed as "Reception dinner", "ceremony", "the after hours", etc. Then, I would like to make "Wedding" and all galleries within "Wedding" unlisted/protected. However, I can then share only "Wedding" with the guests and give access to all galleries within.

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3 Answers

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Unfortunately SmugMug has implemented a rather legacy system of security controls. Sharegroups and Events are almost good but they're completely flat and don't give us the goodness of categorical organization. I ranted about the legacy tools here:

How do I make two homepage and site views - one for friends and family, and another for anonymous visitors?

And you can see on the feedback site and in other places around dgrin and here that people really want to apply security settings at the Category level because we like organizational structure. Ideally passwords would also be eliminated in the future with OpenID and SSO systems like Live, Google, Facebook auth that would allow us to add people access and not just passwords and unlisted URLs.

Until I agree you should stick with Sharegroups. I was a power user with no real need for Pro, but I upgraded to try out Events. I don't think they'd provide you much value over Sharegroups for your use case. One main benefit of Events is you get more control over who has access - at a user/email level, plus it let's visitors comment and vote on photos so you can see which ones people like.

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Thanks for the advice @webby, and thanks for giving some insight into Events. I see sharegroups somewhat as a category in and of itself, but that adds an additional level of complexity on top of categorization, which is unnecessary. I agree that category level security control would be optimal, but as it stands, sharegroups do the job fine. – derekae Jul 6 '12 at 1:44
Then maybe a simpler improvement for SmugMug to implement would be to present a Sharegroup as the list of galleries with their categories in tact. That way you can easily navigate a tree, rather than a long flat list of galleries, just like you would from the landing page. I mean come on guys, have you tried to use "Arrange Galleries" lately?? ;) I think I'll suggest this at feedback.smugmug.com – webby Jul 6 '12 at 4:12
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If all the galleries are unlisted then visitors would not see the category. But what you can do is have them be all unlisted and share them in the form of an event.

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Darn, that's a pro feature. That seems to be a solution, but I am a still currently only a basic-package user and can't check it out because of the limitation of this package. I guess there is no away available for non-pros. Thanks though. If no other answers come in a few days, I'll mark this as the solution. Thanks for tip :) – derekae Jul 3 '12 at 14:30
Wait, may I ask, in the new settings page I found a group called "ShareGroups". What is the difference between an event or a sharegroup? – derekae Jul 3 '12 at 14:41
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Thanks to Andy Williams for offering the idea to create an Event, but that functionality is only available to pro user accounts. Therefore, I went in search of other ways to get the basic functionality that I was looking for that all users could get access to.

After some searching, I found exactly the feature that I needed. What I was looking for was Sharegroups. I am really happy with how it works. It even lets you collect a bunch of unlisted or password-protected galleries and allow access through a single shareable link.

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