Hello Piwigo People,

Having non-browesable albums as a feature would be beneficial to the whole Piwigo community, as it can also be used to create "Landing Pages" that are not on the site map or reachable from another page on the website. A separate landing page can be created for every different advertising campaign you pay for and PR/Marketing strategy you use and then with tools like Google Analytics you can easily see which of your marketing strategies is doing the best at sending engaged users to your website. This is also a very nice way to separate out marketing initiated traffic from SEO initiated traffic so you can track SEO performance in response to website changes.

I have another reason for wanting this feature, and others in the service or contracting industries would find it useful as well. I am trying to use Piwigo as a photo gallery app for a service business (I do Live Bee Removal among other things). When I complete a project, I send the client a link to a photo album of their project. The album name will have their name and city in it, so I want them to be able to choose if they share the album with people or not. If they share the link with people then anyone with that link should be able to view the album without needing passwords. However someone visiting my website should not be able to browse through all of the albums of every project I have ever done. My plan was to turn off all gallery navigation in the menu settings, and then use the "Additional Pages" plugin to implement gallery browsing of "Showcase" albums that are publicly browseable on my website.

I have hidden everything under the "Configuration --> Menus" page and even installed the Advanced Menu Manager plugin. However, an unauthenticated "guest" on the Piwigo site still sees a hierarchical string of links that looks like this:

Home / Albums / <main_category> / <sub_category> / <album_name>

I used the "Additional Pages" plugin to redefine the "Home" page with just a redirect to my actual website home page, but that won't work for the "Albums", <main_category>, & <sub_category> links, as those are all reached via variables passed to the Piwigo index.php script.

What am I missing to remove this unauthorized gallery navigation?

Ultimately I would like to have "hidden" albums that are only browseable by admin, but can be viewed by anyone with the correct album link. I would then publish showcase albums that are sanitized of client data to be browesable via "Albums", "<main_category>", & "<sub_category>". However removing all navigation entirely is the bare minimum needed to protect client privacy.

Any help pointing me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated. Assuming there isn't a simple thing I can do to remove the unauthorized browsing of the entire public gallery, I see two paths forward. Either I use the Piwigo API to develop my own site to display and browse photo albums & run Piwigo on a loopback interface so it isn't exposed to the web, or I develop a Piwigo plugin that implements my needs. Here are the pros and cons of each of those approaches for me:

- Piwigo API:
    - Pros:
        - I can easily define my own SEO URLs that include: /<main_category>/<sub_category>/<album_name>/
        - I can write it in whatever programming language I want.
        - The Piwigo API is fairly simple and well documented, so I can see a path forward to get this done in a framework that I am familiar with.
    - Cons:
        - The Piwigo community does not benefit from this work, since it is a site specific project.
  - Piwigo Plugin:
    - Pros:
        - The Piwigo community benefits from the work.
    - Cons:
        - Developing SEO URLs that include: /<main_category>/<sub_category>/<album_name>/ would require writing a second plugin.
        - I have to write in PHP, which I can do, it is just not on my list of favorite languages.
        - I have read and understood https://github.com/Piwigo/Piwigo/wiki/P … eloppement but I am unfamiliar with the architecture of Piwigo, so I don't have a sense of how hard this will be, or if it is even possible, so I would need a bit of guidance from someone more familiar with Piwigo plugin development.