Password required ???

[Bizer]

Don;

When I click on a specific thumbnail at the top of the forum, the message, "This form requires a password for access" appears. This only happens when I attempt to look at a photo labeled "dam_6.jpg" posted by MCDUDE. It appears to be a newspaper clipping with a 1/8 page photo.

Stewart

[webmaster]

McDude has created several private (or "locked") albums on PhotoPost. That thumbnail you viewed was of a picture in one of his private albums. Although the Featured Pictures bar on the Forum index samples all the thumbnails you can't go any further if the picture is in a private album.

Any member can create albums, public and private, by clicking on the "Album Admin" link when logged in to PhotoPost.

[Island Girl]

Don, I am not finding the Album Admin link. Could be point me there?

Thanks
IG

[webmaster]

IG, I just checked and the Albums were not enabled for all usergroups. Oops. I've fixed that and all members should now see the Album Admin link on the left just below the Recent Posts on the Photopost index.

When asked about albums I always point out one negative about using them: Pictures in albums are not part of the other categories. If you post a picture of your boat in an album it will not appear to visitors browsing through the "Things That Float" category. In some cases this may be fine but in others it just needlessly isolates a picture and limits its exposure. :(

[mcdude]

Hi Folks:
I utilized the private album feature to upload materials that were going to appear in a "themed" thread.....such as "A Ride on the Uncle Sam Mailboat" or "Camp Belknap" etc. Everything in these albums appears somewhere in a thread on the Forum. Many of these are simply pages of text or a page from an article that would be pretty meaningless out of context. I didn't want them popping up in the random Photopost selections. So, like Bizer, I was surprised that they appeared anyway only they can't be accessed. (am I making any sense?) I can make all of the albums public....or, would there be some way of disabling items in private albums from appearing randomly on photopost? McD

PS - an example of an item in a private album that would be kind of 'dumb' popping up randomly in photopost
http://www.winnipesaukee.com/photopost/data/15017/20annals2-med.jpg

[Island Girl]

I like the album feature for telling a story. I still have not uploaded the rest of the pictures for the story I told years ago about Island Guy and I walking out the the island our first winter. The pictures were originally hosted at his work website. If you see strange pictures appearing from a while ago, it is just me completing the album.

Maybe instead of a category for historical information only, one could be made for Winnipesaukee stories that have more that a couple of pictures. There are a few threads earlier this year (some from Rattlesnake Gal) that could go there.

Just my 2 cents!

[webmaster]

mcdude,

The "problem" only appears at the top of the Forum index, not on PhotoPost.

The Forum and PhotoPost are separate software programs from different companies. To help integrate them some basic code was inserted into the Forum index that, among other things, pulls some random thumbnails from PhotoPost for display as samples. It's very basic and doesn't care what category or album the thumbnail is in. PhotoPost itself is smarter and thumbnails from private albums are not displayed in either recent or random displays.

When you create a private album the structure and index of the album is hidden but the raw images themselves are not. This allowed mcdude to do what he did: create a private album but still link to the pictures in forum messages.

It's a little strange but it does make sense on this site. Although I welcome the way that mcdude uses private albums I wouldn't want to provide albums that have no public use whatsoever. That wouldn't be a good use of storage space on my server.