September 03, 2006

Coming Full Circle (or 270° At Least)

Some of you may have noticed that over this weekend, heretofore private albums in my photo gallery suddenly became public—sort of. This was not a mistake, nor did my site get hacked. After all the fanfare only nine months ago, why did I suddenly reverse my position regarding privacy of photographs?

Well, in short, I did not. If you look carefully, you will notice that although all albums are now visible to the public, only the thumbnails—and not the higher resolution images—are accessible for most personal photographs. Furthermore, many more risqué photos from yesteryears have been restricted from public view completely. In general, I decided to reverse my decision to make fully private my gallery for a number of reasons:

1. Most personal photographs are not of just me, and the bottom line is that creating a separate account is a tedious process likely to make most people think twice. I do want to share my photographs with friends (and friends of friends), and thus, opening up my gallery (at least partially) seemed to be a golden mean between complete exposure and complete privacy.
2. Even if I were to guard my own pictures with the utmost secrecy, this says nothing about the countless other folks who will post their pictures from the same events online with nary a second thought. If people can still find the same images from another source, why should I bother suppressing mine?
3. Since the RSS feed for Gallery is based on permissions of the underlying items (e.g., photographs, albums), the public RSS feed would only show public items, thus making it impossible for anyone to get updates on newly posted (private) items, essentially invalidating the RSS feed altogether.
4. Finally, the effort of making separate group accounts for each separate event I attended so that people could access my gallery was getting tedious and time-consuming for me; to make my life easier, I decided to allow partial access.

Hopefully, this new model will achieve a decent compromise between two extremes. Casual observers simply interested in seeing an album can view the (rather low resolution, in my opinion) thumbnails; those wanting to see the higher resolution photographs (and thus, much of the details), can still access these photographs by creating an account. Also, as an added bonus, my gallery RSS feed is now fully functional. Happy viewing!