Authentication

Contents (🔗)

Overview (🔗)

You might decide to share your private photos on your WP site. A typical use case would be, you are running a closed WP site where only certain members have access, but once they log into WP, they should be able to see your Flickr Photos. But even within this set, you might want to restrict access to some photos only. Photonic supports both these types of access, via Authentication and Privacy levels:

  1. Authentication, where a visitor to your website will see what you are authorized to see (you login behind the scenes)
  2. Privacy levels, where even after authentication, you are able to limit access to certain areas to certain people

Authentication (🔗)

Setup of authentication is documented in the main Authentication page.

Once you have authenticated yourself to your account behind the scenes, you can display what you choose show. I have followed the instructions in the documentation and set up authentication for myself.

In the following examples, I am using an album that has some private photos. For reference, this is the album’s URL. If you visit the link, you will see just one photo, titled “Should I approach or should I not?”. That is the only public photo in that album.

Now, after I have authenticated myself, I will use the following shortcode and pull the album:

[gallery type='flickr' user_id='35553131@N07' photoset_id='72157677596163215']

You can see in the above that all photos of the album are displayed, not just the public one! That is what authentication facilitates. Without authentication, I would just see the one photo.

Privacy Levels (🔗)

Now let’s consider another scenario. What if you had some photos in the album that you really wanted to keep private? Flickr has some native capabilities here, and offers 5 levels of protection:

  • 1 – Public photos
  • 2 – Private photos visible to friends
  • 3 – Private photos visible to family
  • 4 – Private photos visible to friends and family
  • 5 – Completely private photos

The album above, San Diego has 5 photos, but only 1 is public (“Should I approach or should I not?”). I will now display the photos in the album with various privacy filters.

First, I will tweak the shortcode to only show public photos (level 1):

[gallery type='flickr' user_id='35553131@N07' photoset_id='72157677596163215' privacy_filter='1' headers='']

Here’s what you can expect to see:

  • With authentication (currently turned on): the photo titled “Should I approach or should I not?”
  • Without authentication: the photo titled “Should I approach or should I not?”. There is no difference from the first option, since both will show public photos.

Now for photos shared amongst friends (level 2):

[gallery type='flickr' user_id='35553131@N07' photoset_id='72157677596163215' privacy_filter='2' headers='']

Here’s what you can expect to see:

  • With authentication (currently turned on): the photo titled “Petting”
  • With authentication: the photo titled “Should I approach or should I not?”

These are my photos shared amongst family members (level 3):

[gallery type='flickr' user_id='35553131@N07' photoset_id='72157677596163215' privacy_filter='3' headers='']

Here’s what you can expect to see:

  • With authentication (currently turned on): the photo titled “Getting close”
  • Without authentication: the photo titled “Should I approach or should I not?”

These are my photos shared amongst friends and family (level 4):

[gallery type='flickr' user_id='35553131@N07' photoset_id='72157677596163215' privacy_filter='4' headers='']

Here’s what you can expect to see:

  • With authentication (currently turned on): the photo titled “Snooze”
  • Without authentication: the photo titled “Should I approach or should I not?”

These are my completely private photos (level 5):

[gallery type='flickr' user_id='35553131@N07' photoset_id='72157677596163215' privacy_filter='5' headers='']

Here’s what you can expect to see:

  • With authentication (currently turned on): the photo titled “Lazy Loungers”
  • Without authentication: the photo titled “Should I approach or should I not?”