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M
Maël29005106wwo4
Participant
September 2, 2023
Question

Best way to share albums privately with family ? Are galleries hidden ?

  • September 2, 2023
  • 1 reply
  • 2979 views

Hello,

I'm using Lightroom Creative Cloud with 1tb storage. All my photos and albums are stored on the cloud. I don't have Lightroom Classic.

I want to share albums with my family so :

- They can easily access any of them, anytime

- They can download high res images if they want to print some

 

I tried to publish a portfolio, since I could manage rights there, it seemed like a great option. But Adobe portfolios drastically limit files quality on download, so it's a definitive no.

I tried to share albums with a "public" link (only owners of the link can connect). It works well, but it has flaws : quality is a bit downgraded (not by much, but still) and all albums aren't accessible with one link only.

Finally I tried the "Gallery" feature, wich looks great : several albums accessible from the the same page, and highest quality downloads. But I cannot manage the rights from anywhere and the url starts with "https://lightroom.adobe.com/gallery/..." as opposed to directly shared albums whose links start with "https://adobe.ly/" which seems more hidden.

So I'm thinking about putting all my family albums on this gallery feature but I am a bit frightened : how easily can they be accessed by someone ? There's no information about these galeries on Adobe website. The gallery feature in itself is not presented as private in any way by Adobe so I don't know if it's a good idea.

What do you think ? Do you have better ways to share family albums ?

NB: I just wished so hard Adobe Portfolios allowed highest res downloads, that seems ridiculous to me, as a paid user whose highest res photos are all stored on the cloud... 😕😕

Thanks a lot !

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

J
Community Expert
Jao vdLCommunity Expert
Community Expert
September 2, 2023

Directly shared albums is the only way that works in the Adobe ecosystem and you can set it to only share to certain users. Portfolio also can be coaxed into allowing full res downloads. That said, you are far better off for your use case using other services such as Apple Photos or Google Photos to share images with family. They will realy appreciate it if you go through these services that they already know and that actually work well for this use case.

M
Maël29005106wwo4Author
Participant
September 2, 2023

Thanks a lot for your answer.

How can portfolio be coaxed into allowing full res downloads ? I've read several topics about the subject and thought it was a hard limitation from Adobe with no workaround.

The thing is some family members do not have Apple Photos and some do not have Google Photos. And that would mean I have to manually export the photos from Lr to another app, and if I make updates to the collections or photos, these would not be synced, it looks like a pain to me. I was hoping for a natural Lr-based cloud solution since I'm paying for a cloud storage.

At this point, directly shared albums is the best option to my taste (simple link, anyone can access and view photos, and download if wished, in decent resolution) but I was hoping there was something even better. I loved the way you could hide pages on a portfolio and limit access with a password. It would have been great if I could have a gallery with different albums and access rights limited via password !

J
Community Expert
Jao vdLCommunity Expert
Community Expert
September 2, 2023

Honestly I don't know how you would get portfolio to allow full res downloads but I've read it is possible somehow. I have never used it myself as it seems so extremely limited. Shared albums with password is the way to go. You can limit the lightroom web galleries to specific people by instead of making the link public, clicking on the little +person icon at the right top, make the gallery invite only and adding specific people. You can't share a hierarchy of web albums this way though so you have to explicitly share each separately.

Personally I use smugmug for my professional website as well as for family sharing. This works superbly as there is a plugin for Classic and a connector for Lightroom Cloudy and has extensive control over access and you can set up complex hierarchies of galleries. This is far better and actually easier than Lightroom web but is an extra cost. There are several sites like smugmug that offer similar services such as zenfolio and others. I also use Apple Photos with my direct family members (even the ones that like android - they just go through a web browser) and that works really well by simply exporting images and dragging them into the photos app into a shared album and they already understand how it works. Sharing albums and such in Photos (both Apple and google) works far better than in Lightroom unfortunately.  

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