Zenfolio knows how important your images are to you. We have many ways to protect your photos.
The Access Control panel, accessible via the Details Column, allows you to control your visitors' access to your photos and other information.
The following elements can be enabled or disabled through Access Control:
- Controlling Access – As the owner of the photographs, you have full control over who can view them. You can specify who can access each individual photograph or you can apply access settings to a gallery or an entire group.
- Expiration – Groups, Galleries, and Collections can be set to expire with Private access on a set date.
- Hiding public galleries inside private groups – Making a public gallery available to visitors through direct links by e-mail invitations, but hidden from your Home Page.
- Controlling the largest allowed Image Size – Eight display size options are available to you. The maximum display size of your photos can be changed at any time and can apply to a single photograph or to an entire gallery or group.
- Protection of original files – As the owner of the photographs, you always have the option of downloading the original photo files. You can offer this feature to your clients if you choose but it is not available to visitors unless you enable this feature.
- The ability to hide/show EXIF and IPTC data – The option to hide or show EXIF and IPTC information is always available to you.
- Remove Recently Added section from Home page –The Recently Added section of your Zenfolio page can be edited at any time or hidden from your visitors' view.
- Controlling the adding to Collection feature and how photos are found – You have the option of disallowing users to add your photos to collections as well
- Control how items are found – choosing to exclude your photos from public Search and Browse.
- Control comments and guestbook entries – Guestbook and Comments are managed by you and these features can be hidden or shown on your Zenfolio pages as you see fit.
Using the 'Private' Setting and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The top level group in the account is called the All Photographs group. This group contains all of the galleries and photos in your account. If this group is set to 'Private' in its Access Control settings, it will cause the site's homepage to not be indexable by search engines like Google. This will cause your site to not appear in search results.
So if you would like your site to appear in search results, make sure that the All Photographs group is not set to 'Private' in its Access Control settings.
You can protect your images and keep them private by locking the individual groups and galleries that contain your private photos (you can set them to Private or Lock them with a Password). You can also set individual groups and galleries to not be searchable by search engines.
Gallery Lockout Feature
To enhance the security of password-protected galleries, entering an incorrect password too many times will lock that user out of the gallery for a period of time.
After entering the incorrect password too many times, we will display the following message "You have one more attempt remaining before this gallery may be locked. Please contact photographer if you do not remember the password". If the enter an incorrect password again, we will send a notification e-mail to the photographers main email address on file.
Please see this guide for more details on this feature.
Other suggested ways to protect your photos:
- Only allowing smaller images to be saved – You can offer your visitors the ability to download images in smaller sizes than the original if you wish.
- Creating and applying watermarks – As an added measure of security, Zenfolio offers a Watermark feature that automatically adds a standard or custom watermark to the display of your images.
- Disabled right-click Saving – Zenfolio users also take advantage of a custom right-click option on all of their photos. The standard browser right click options are over-ridden and replaced with Buy, Show Link to Photo, Dim the Lights and Download Original (only if you've allowed the downloading of original images).
Please also see this video on how to create secure client galleries: