I do not want to deal with user accounts.
I am not in a high value environment where I need to strongly enforce privacy. I just want a little privacy.
I want the average random visitor to my site to be able to see most of the content without having to login.
I have Family and Friends (F&F) that I want to have access to a private area.
I use the "unpublished" feature to accomplish this.
I publish everything I want public.
I keep an unpublished album called Private for my F&F. I put sub-albums in the Private album and publish the sub-albums. I give F&F the direct link to the unpublished Private album. That way F&F have access to all of the sub-albums under Private. This seems to work well enough.
It is my understanding that after a direct link it used, that machine/browser combo can see the unpublished album without using the direct link again. So, given the above description,
one of my F&F uses the direct link to get to Private and then browse down to the album of interest. Once they close their browser and reboot their machine, I think they are able to go through the front door of the website to the gallery and they will see the unpublished Private album because they have used the direct link sometime in the past.
When I login as admin, I see everything, published or not. When I log out, I only see what is published or what I have used a direct link to.
I have visited or done work on my site from several different machines/browsers but I have forgotten what and how I accessed from where and when. I am having difficulty reestablishing an environment that looks like a random 1st time visitor to my site so that I can verify what they do/don't see.
1) Do I have an accurate understanding of the way that access to unpublished albums persists after a direct link is used?
2) Where/how is that persistence remembered and how can I reset it?
2a) Is it a cookie in the browser? If yes, what is it so I can clear it?
2c) Is it a table in the database? If yes, what is it so I can clear it?
If this is already addressed somewhere, please point me in the right direction.
May not be relevant but ...
Zenphoto version 1.4.4.1 [596740f651] (Official build)
Current locale setting: en_US.UTF8
Current gallery theme: SimpleMix (--->custom theme<---)
PHP version: 5.3.27
Graphics support: PHP GD library bundled (2.1.0 compatible)
supporting: gif, jpg, jpeg, png, bmp
PHP memory limit: 128M (Note: Your server might allocate less!)
MySQL version: 5.5.30
Thanks