People have been asking me if there is a way to allow searching and viewing but not adding or editing in photos. In a future release, there will be some pretty decent user/permissions stuff but for now there are several ways to go.

The easiest is probably to install photos in a separate directory, use a symbolic link to the gallery_photos folder in your original install, and use a database user that only has SELECT privileges, not INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE. If your visitors try to edit or add photos, the SQL queries will fail and nothing will happen – probably some errors will show up.

Another way to go is to do the separate install and limited access database user, but also go through the app and pulll out all the edit, delete and add buttons. You could also use an .htaccess file to require a username/password for certain pages.

Anyway, users and read-only access will be coming in a future release.

This post is part of the project: Photos. View the project timeline for more context on this post.