Password Protected Collections

[dimip77]

It is something that the community has been asking for years.

PLEASE DON'T SLEEP AND DO IT

The possibility to view Lightroom Collections only after the immision of a password would be so obviously usefull, you guys at Adobe are really doing nothing to protect our sensitive images in this sense.
And we are not talking about collections that are made public, but just normal private collections.

People that work with several computer or other devices might need to have the access to some catalogs, but not all the collections should be seen by everyone.

Just make the opportunity to protect the collections with a password. Please!

It has been years of requests!

[dj_paige]

PLEASE DON'T SLEEP AND DO IT

I cannot do it! I simply cannot! We are not Adobe employees here in this forum, we are other Lightroom Classic users. We cannot change the code.

You need to make a feature request to Adobe. PLEASE DON'T SLEEP AND DO IT.

[dimip77]

Yes of course, this is a message to Adobe... since several Adobe emplyees should read this community.

[richardplondon]

Say a particular Collection did require a password, before viewing its contents.

That would control this one particular way of presenting those images.

But they would all still be viewable within their folders. Or in a Smart Collection (for example, one selecting for recently edited images); or via 'All Photographs'; or in 'Previous Import'; or within any other Collection(s) they might already belong to, or get added to; or within a Publish Collection / Publish Smart Collection; or in a Print Collection, Book layout, Map view...

...since they are all members of the wider image library, besides belonging to that one Collection.

Nor would it prevent those same image files on disk from being imported into a different Catalog, and then viewed there; or opened into ACR; or simply seen via the OS file browser.

[dimip77]

Well if a photo is inserted in a password protected collection.... it should be removed from any other possible collection.

Not so difficult.

[Conrad C]

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@dimip77 wrote:

Well if a photo is inserted in a password protected collection.... it should be removed from any other possible collection.

Not so difficult.

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Not difficult to implement technically, but that sounds absolutely horrible to work with. The post you replied to listed all of the different jobs that collections  do in Lightroom Classic, so if a photo is in a password-protected collection, it cannot be used in many valuable features like print jobs, books, slide shows, etc.

So if you password-protect a collection, any photos in that collection used in multiple projects in progress could just disappear from those projects, resulting in things like blank cells on print layouts and blank pages in the Book module? And those photos disappear from collections where it may have been added for an important reason? Unfortunately these are the kinds of destructive side effects (side bugs) that would complicate the implementation of a feature request.

But you know your needs, so you do have a right to request it. If you want your feature request to be implemented, mentioning it here and assuming the right Adobe employee might come by and take the initiative to make it happen is a less effective way to do it. The more effective way? At the Lightroom Feedback site, Adobe employees including product managers do check in regularly (not casually like here), and feature requests (the Ideas category) are quantified (voted on by users), tracked, acknowledged by actual Adobe employees when they become significant on the list, and when implemented, often acknowedged in the Adobe release notes in the version where it is implemented. That does not happen on this forum, which is just for general help discussion among users.

Just be aware that still guarantees nothing, because your feature request is up against hundreds (thousands?) of other requests from other users, so it all must be prioritized since resources are not infinite. If a bunch of people think your request makes a lot of immediate sense and vote for it there, that helps elevate its visibility. But Adobe still has to decide that a particular request is more important than other items in their development pipeline (competitive and marketing priorities, plus bug fixes), as well as having no significant technical side effects like removing pictures from collections used for projects.

[richardplondon]

Furthermore: even if photos got forcibly stripped of any other Collection memberships they had, how would they be prevented from being looked at within the folder? You cannot sensibly suppress them from appearing there (if you could, any deletion of this special Collection would then leave them completely inaccessible).

Or what happens when (say) a keyword search is done or a new Smart Collection is made, and some of these photos would qualify to appear there?

AFAICT the best control would be to have different computer user accounts, and to maintain separate Catalogs and image storage locations to which access permissions are then set on a user-by-user basis. That way the privacy / confidentiality of the images is clearly demonstrable.

But less "officiously", nesting and naming Collection Sets and Collections (and folders) in a way that makes them look sufficiently unexciting, means they are far less likely to attract anyone else's monkey curiosity! For sure avoiding giveaway terms such as "private" or "confidential", which are a powerful magnet for that - however well intentioned the person may be.

[DS256]

"The possibility to view Lightroom Collections only after the immision of a password would be so obviously usefull,..." Personally, I don't see this as a benefit. LrC is a single user application. It is not shared with other users.

Now, if you are talking about 'locking' images/collections etc, to prevent accidental modification, I can see that.

[DdeGannes]

I am not sure what you trying to achieve but your license to Adobe apps is a single user / owner license.

To gain access to your collections they would have to use your user ID to your account or you would have to physically share a particular collection/ collections with a link.

[JohanElzenga]

Modern operating systems like Windows and MacOS allow you to create different users with their own passwords. If you do not want other people to see your collections, then do not give them access to your Windows or Mac user account. Give them their own account if they need to use the same computer sometimes. That makes a lot more sense than all kinds of passwords at the application level, or even the collection level.