Password Protection & Search Engines

[Aisne]

I have set up a gallery on one of my websites which needs to be private. If I wanted this gallery to stay private and not be able to be crawled so that pictures appeared on google etc would it help if I had to password protect the coppermine folder or can search engine crawlers get through that?

[Sami]

You can keep search engine from accessing by setting robot.txt
and yes if you set password for that album , even a search engine couldn't get through taht

[Joachim Müller]

Using password protection is one option, allowing only logged in users to browse your gallery another. Basically, all that search engine spiders do is follow the links on your page as if they were human site visitors. They don't go through registration though. If none of your pics is visible for guests (i.e. users who are not logged in), then they won't be visible for the search engine spiders. Subsequently, your images won't turn up on the page.
Additionally, you should do as suggested and create a robots.txt file. You can't use this method exclusively though, as some search engine spiders don't respect your wishes voiced in robots.txt (the most important spiders - google bot being the most important - will obey your robots.txt file though).
To find out more about robots.txt, review How Google crawls my site. I'd recommend allowing google to index your public pages (if there are any) and explicitely denying it to index any pics at all by adding

Code Select Expand

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /your_coppermine_folder/

Additionally, you should make up your mind on hotlink-protection, because of two reasons:
1) Hotlinkers steal your bandwidth
2) Google won't care for the location of the pic, but where it gets defined inside html pages. If a third-party site embeds a hotlinked pic from your page, it will get indexed - even if you have disallowed the google spider.

Bottom line: this is all nice and necessary - you probably want to protect the people depicted on your pics from abuse. However, you have to keep in mind how the www works. If you're really worried about privacy, you shouldn't put your pics on the internet in the first place.

[Aisne]

Many thanks for all the info and advice and just in case anyone is wondering there is nothing illegal or sex orientated about the pictures .... LOL. They're really very harmless and innocent just those who are posting prefer to have the forum private.

[Joachim Müller]

I understand that perfectly well, that's why my personal gallery is only 40% open to the public and the rest is private (you need to be logged and in a particular group that I assign users to in order to be able to see the private pics). Similar to yours, they are not sex-orientated, but just the usual family and party pics - my users just wouldn't want to see a printout of a party pic (with them wearing a funny hat) on the blackboard at their job. I also noticed that some perverts had deep links from their strange child-porn hideouts pointing to pics that depicted non-nude children of my family and friends. Although there is nothing morally wrong with those pics I wouldn't want to see them viewed by those jerks to satisfy their child-abuse fantasies.
Bottom line: I understand your concern for privacy pretty well - that used to be one of the reasons why I joined the Coppermine team in the first place - I wanted to see those features implemented.