If you are an Admin or Editor, you can give other people permission to view (and potentially download) files from your organization's Portal using the Visibility & Access settings in your Library.
Organize your Library according to who needs access
In many cases, it makes sense to organize your files according who needs access. For example, if everyone on your organization's marketing team needs the same kind of access, you could keep all of the Galleries for them inside a single Collection called Marketing. If this strategy sounds appealing, you'll also want to add the individual members of the marketing team to an Invited Users Group and give that group access to the Marketing collection.
In this example:
- You can add (or remove) someone's access to the Marketing collection by adding (or removing) their email address from the marketing team Invited User Group.
- You can give everyone on the marketing team access to new content by adding it to a new (or existing) Gallery in the Marketing Collection. Conversely, you can prevent the marketing team from accessing content by removing those files from the Marketing Collection.
Give different kinds of access to different kinds of stakeholders
In PhotoShelter, several different permissions can exist on the same Collection/Gallery, reducing the need to duplicate files just to share them with different kinds of stakeholders. For example, you could give your graphic design team permission to download your original files while creating a second permission for the social media team that only gives them sizes suitable for the web. In this example, note the individual Invited Users will either belong to the graphic design User Group or the social media User Group. The same Invited User should not be added to both User Groups because it would be redundant.
Important notes:
The Library and Portal are different
It's important to note that V&A settings only apply to your organization's public-facing Portal. Library staff (the Admin, Editors and Taggers) can always see all files that have been uploaded to your account.
Visibility & Access is set for Collections and Galleries, not the files
With PhotoShelter, all of the files inside a Gallery are subject to the same V&A settings. In other words, you can’t hide half of the files in a Gallery and show the other half. If this is desired, you'll need to use two Galleries different V&A settings.
Visibility & Access can apply to individual Invited Users or User Groups
You can invite individuals or entire groups of people to view and/or download files from your Portal. We recommend considering who will need access your different kinds of content as you decide how to organize your files in PhotoShelter.
The Portal looks streamlined for Invited Users/User Groups when every sub-Collection and sub-Gallery inherit permissions from a parent Collection in the Library.
If you have a specific group of people who need unique access to one or more galleries, grant them native visibility permission to the Gallery (in addition to the inherited permissions applied to the Gallery).
Granting duplicate visibility permissions causes Invited Users to see duplicates on the Portal
If you intend to grant multiple User Groups permission to see/download from the same Collections/Galleries, it would be redundant to have the same Invited User in more than one of those User Groups. If the Invited User has two or more permissions to see a Collection/Gallery, they will see this Collection/Gallery twice on the Portal website. Granting an Invited User or User Group duplicate permissions may negatively impact their Portal experience.
New Collections/Galleries in the Library are private
If you create a new Collection or Gallery at the root level of your Library, it will not be visible on your organization's Portal without changing its V&A settings.
If you create a new Collection or Gallery inside another Collection, you can choose whether you'd like to have it inherit it's V&A settings from its parent Collection.