Due to rising costs on my photo website / domain, I am considering moving a private gallery of photos to my Nextcloud to share with family members.
However, I’d like the ability to restrict/remove the option to download photos, as I suspect the gallery link will be shared multiple times, and I want to retain control of who can download files.
Sharing the link to public just seems to make it available to download individual or complete album files. Is there a way to have a public link that is view only? I suppose I could share a Folder as a public link, but I think the presentation in Photos or Memories would be nicer if I could just disable downloads.
You can prevent the download when sharing folders and files in the sharing settings for every share. The download icon will then not be displayed. However, your user can simply add /download to https://cloud.server.tld/s/abcdefghijklmno to the URL e.g. https://cloud.server.tld/s/abcdefghijklmno/download, to enable the download. But maybe your users don’t know that. It would probably make more sense to get a Nextcloud hoster where the download is not a problem. You can also use passwords and/or expiry dates for shares.
You could also set up guest accounts for the users you want to share the photos with, and then share the photos directly with those accounts instead of using public links. But even with that, the users you shared the photos with could still redistribute them through other channels, or they could take screenshots or pictures of the screen with their phones, etc.
Ultimately, it’s an illusion to think that you can reliably prevent things you share online from being redistributed, which is something that even the DRM systems of the big streaming companies fail to do, otherwise there wouldn’t be piracy sites offering the latest Netflix show on release day
I appreciate the info. I know how to remove the Download button for a folder share, but is it possible to do this with the Photos Album/app? I couldn’t find a way in Photos itself. I would prefer to share the album as opposed to sharing a folder, but if I can only remove downloads from the folder I’ll have to go that way.
Family users I have aren’t savvy enough to know to add Downloads, and not likely to know how to screen capture. I just am trying to avoid an obvious download button to get the full size JPG file
I don’t know much about the Photo app. But you could of course upload all the pictures in lower quality and then share them. You can use “convert” from Imagemagick for this. Or if the images are not confidential, use a web service like Resize multiple images at once! . You can upload multiple images and get a zip file with the smaller images back.
Unlike with regular file shares, it doesn’t seem possible to configure links generated by albums, neither in Photos nor in Memories, or at least I couldn’t find a way to do so. Maybe you can open a feature request: https://github.com/nextcloud/photos/issues
Thanks for checking, yes I couldn’t find a way in either Memories or Photos to prevent downloads. That’s why I wanted to check here first to make sure I hadn’t overlooked it. Thanks!
