After reading "Getting Started" and "How to Upload Files", you will have everything you need to use this site for publishing your photos, but before uploading your honeymoon pictures, you should probably be aware of just a few more things.
Privacy
The default access privileges assigned to a new folder allows any casual visitor to the site to view your photos and read any comments you might have entered. However, it is possible to restrict access to a folder, and all the pictures inside it, to only a select group of family and friends.
But in order to do this, your friends will have to identify themselves every time they visit the site by entering a username and password, and that means they would have to be a registered user. Although registering an account is painless, your friends may be not appreciate it, especially if they are not interested in uploading their own photos.
If you can't get them to register themselves, you could just give them your username and password, and trust them not to mess around with your stuff, although you would have no control over this or even know who did it. And you can be sure, your sister will delete any picture of her that she doesn't like. On the other hand, already having a username tends to encourage people to upload their own photos, which greatly enhances everyone's enjoyment of the site.
So if privacy is important to you, we recommend having at least 2 accounts, one for yourself for creating folders, granting access privileges and uploading your photos, and another one for all your friends and family to use, which could also have uploading privileges into one or more of your folders and because of the username, you can easily identify them.
The only wrinkle is that you can't use the same email address for both accounts, so if you wish to setup this arrangement and you only have one email address available to you, contact the Webmaster and he will be able to setup another account with your same email address.
Access Privileges
This is a difficult subject and managing access privileges to your folders is no easy task. The most important thing to remember is that each folder has its own access privileges that are completely independent of any other folder, including the parent folder!
This means that if you have a secret "Owner Only" folder and you create a subfolder inside it with the default access privileges, then your normally hidden secret folder will appear in the Directory for all visitors to the site because that is the only way the public can get to the files in the subfolder. But of course, if they click your secret folder, it will always say that no files were found because after all, only you have access privileges.
Every folder is assigned one of the following basic Access Privileges that affect all the files inside it but not any subfolders or the files inside them.
Group - Everybody has full access privileges, including deleting and renaming them, and they also will be able to create subfolders that have different access privileges, perhaps even denying you access, or in other words, setting up their own secret subfolder.
Owner Only - Only you can access the files inside this folder and unless there is a publicly accessible subfolder inside it, then the folder will not even be listed in the Directory for anyone except you and the Administrators of this site.
Limited - You set each individual privilege, including whether another user can create subfolders or change the access privileges for other users.
To change the Access Privileges, click the target folder in the Directory, then click "Edit Folder" at the top of the Directory near the red cross and select one of the Access Privileges and save. If you selected "Limited", a page of all the possible privileges will be displayed but already setup with the default privileges of allowing everyone the privilege to view any file in this folder.
You can now assign another, different set of privileges for each user or group of users for this same folder. The final disposition of a particular user's access privileges is an accumulation of all the privileges assigned to him and any group that he belongs to.
For instance, the default privileges for a new folder allows everyone to download (view) its files. If you then wanted to allow another registered user to be able to also upload files into that folder, you would click the "New Privileges" button on the Limited Access Privileges page and select his username in the first dropdown list, then click the "Upload Files" checkbox. However, you could also uncheck "Download Files" and he would still be able to download since the default privileges allowing everyone to download files were not revoked.
To prevent all access by the general public, but allow a particular username limited access to your files, you would first need to revoke the default privileges then setup new privileges for the particular user. You can't just change the default privileges to "Deny Access" because that would apply to everyone regardless of any other privileges you grant and it takes precedence over all the other privileges.
Revoking all the privileges to a folder would have the same effect as setting the Access Privileges to "Owner Only" on the "Edit Folder" page. And checking all the boxes except "Deny Access" and "Change Security" for the default privileges would be the same as setting "Group" Access Privileges (assuming it's the Public Domain). Also note that you as the owner of the folder, always have full access privileges to it and all of the files it contains, so even if you give "Change Security" privileges to another user, they will not be able to block you.
However, if you allow another user to create subfolders inside your folder, they may decide not to grant you any access privileges on these subfolders, which means you will not be able to delete or change them in any way. In fact, you probably will not even be aware they exist, which will prevent you from ever deleting your own folder, should you want to, so make sure you are on very good terms before granting another user the "Make Subfolders" privilege.
Uploading Lots of Files
As you know, uploading a file through your browser will only let you do one picture at a time. What would be nice is to simply specify a folder on your hard-drive and have all the files inside it automatically upload to this site. This is possible, but because of the security features built into your browser that prevent a web page from accessing the files on your hard-drive directly, you will have to install a small program on your computer to perform this task.
Sure, if you are using Internet Explorer on Windows, I could automatically install this program on your computer, like the spyware sites do, but this is wrong and shame on Microsoft for allowing this to happen without your knowledge.
So you must download and install this little program yourself.
Linux/Unix - Download the buploader shell script into your favorite bin directory and make sure it is executable, then run buploader on a command line with no parameters and you should see a brief usage description. This shell script requires the CLI version of PHP 4.3 or newer to be already installed on your computer.
Mac OS X - Follow the instructions above for downloading the buploader shell script for Linux/Unix. Panther (10.3) and Tiger (10.4) already have the PHP CLI version installed, otherwise you will have to install it yourself. I think Marc Liyanage at www.entropy.ch has a one-click installer for Jaguar (10.2) available, but first enter php -v in the Terminal to see if you already have it. However, if you are running anything less than Panther, you should really, really upgrade because it's a huge improvement in every way. Although buploader will work fine, I recommend you also download a little GUI for it written in Xcode called "Upload Files" because it saves your credentials in a preference file and lots prettier. Just double-click to uncompress it and park the one executable file anywhere you want.
Windows - Unfortunately, I do not have a good solution yet, but I hope to have something soon.
These programs communicate with the site via a Web Service that requires your Username, Password and XML Access Code that you can get from the "Account Information" page. If you are going to use the "Upload Files" program, then the buploader script does not have to be in a bin directory because "Upload Files" will ask you to locate it the first time you run it, so I would put buploader in the same folder as "Upload Files", perhaps in your Applications folder.
Please see "File Server Web Service" and the buploader script for more information. And as always, feel free to contact the Webmaster for assistance or just to let him know how it's working.
Unsupported Browsers and Dialup
Not every browser is supported by this site, especially older browsers. If an unsupported browser is detected, this
Upgrade page is displayed and the site cannot be accessed until they get a better browser.
Unfortunately, many people exhibit an incredible inertia when it comes to upgrading software on their computers, even when the benefits are huge, like Internet Explorer 6 compared to earlier versions. It's especially shameful when you considered that browsers in particular, have been purposely designed to be the easiest software to upgrade and install. Just click a link and it will automatically download, install and configure itself. And it's absolutely free!
Slow dialup connections can also be a problem, since this is rather a robust site which focuses more on features than speed, so people with slower connections may not fully embrace the site, especially for uploading files.
We recognize that the problem of unsupported browsers and slow connections can be a significant roadblock to using the site and should be something for you to consider, too.
