SmugMug's Don MacAskill

I told you we’d listen.

After Philipp brought the issue up, we carefully listened to both our current customers and our potential would-be customers. Our current customers were a mixed bag. Luckily, most didn’t care one way or the other. Of those who did care, many didn’t want this change. 😦 But it was clear that lots of potential customers did. And as I said in my initial post, “Philipp is absolutely right.”

So we fixed the problem.

We made two big mistakes with this situation, one technical and one around setting user expectations. I was dumb for using autoincrement IDs alone, and we were dumb for calling the gallery setting ‘Private’ when that wasn’t clear enough. “Private” means different things to different people, and we should have known better. Both of these things, I believe, have now been remedied.

Here are the gory details and we have a dgrin thread with more:

• Your new galleries, photos, and videos are more private, and secure, than ever before.
• GUIDs did turn out to be both messy and expensive, as I thought they would be. We opted not to go that route.
• Instead, we created Keys for galleries and photos/videos and appended them to the relevant URLs. Kudos to Barnabus for planting this seed.
• The keys are made of 57 possible alphanumeric characters, and are 5 characters long, making the search space 57^5, or 601,692,057, strong. In theory, still guessable, but in practice, prohibitively expensive/difficult to do. Not to mention the fact that you have all the usual additional security and privacy settings you can turn on.
• Yes, this made our permalinks uglier. No, we’re not happy about it. But we think the tradeoff is worth it.
• Yes, older galleries and photos/videos are grandfathered. Their old URLs without the Keys still work. All new photos/videos, as well as old photos/videos inside of new galleries, require Keys to access. Same with new galleries.
• If you don’t want your older stuff grandfathered, simply create a new gallery and move your photos & videos from your old gallery into the new one. Key’d links will instantly be required for access (if you change your mind, just move them back and they’ll be re-grandfathered). Alternatively, you can set a password and turn off external links.
• The privacy options when creating a gallery and changing a gallery’s setting now use “Public” and “Unlisted” rather than “Public” and “Private” to better explain the difference and match customer expectations.
• When creating a new gallery, there’s a new option called “Lock it down” that’ll take things a step further and set all the right privacy *and* security settings to prevent unwanted access.
• This is a big, complicated release, so there will likely be bugs and bumps along the way. Let us know if you find any and I promise we’ll fix them.

I’m sorry this change took so long to ship. We were actually in testing last Thursday, January 31st, but then I was traveling from Friday to Wednesday, so we had to put it off. Thanks for your patience while we thought about the problem, discussed it with our community, and put together an update.

Special thanks to our customers and friends who weighed in with lots of detail both about the problem and the implementation, and Philipp for being so passionate and firm about the situation.

We’d love to hear your thoughts about this either here in the comments or over on this dgrin thread.