paolobenve/myphotoshare

privacy concerns when showing original image

Opened this issue · 4 comments

paolobenve commented

I'm understanding what is said in #99 : original images shouldn't be offered to the user for privacy concerns.

However, someone could like offering them: galleries with images released in the public domain or with a very open licence.

So I'd add two options:

  • expose_original_image = no
  • expose_original_image_metadata = no

Obviously, the second option matters only if the first is set to yes.

Behaviour with expose_original_image:

  • if it's set to yes, the original image is showed like now, not from albums directory but from cache: the scanner will put it in the cache directory, removing the metadata if expose_original_image_metadata is no
  • if it's set to no, the scanner will not copy the original image to the cache directory, and javascript will choose the cache image only among the reduced size images, which have no metadata.

This behaviour makes unuseful to export the server_album_path to javascript, doesn't it?

Do we delay 3.4 release after this issue solved?

pmetras commented

This can wait for version 3.5 or later I think. Version 3.4 already has great features...

Yes, server_album_path is useless in JavaScript, as far as I understand. I had planned to look at all .json files in 3.5 and check whether exported information was useful or not.

paolobenve commented

So do you think we can release 3.4 exposing the original image with all its metadata?

Would't it be something that could prevent people from taking it into account in the future?

pmetras commented

Yes. Those who don't want to give access to the original media only have to put them in a place that is not accessible by the web server. That's what I've done with the Debian package. In the case the computer is used by multiple users, I've set the album_path value to /usr/local/share/media that is owned by user myphotoshare and made world writable. That way all users can drop content in that folder but it's content can't be seen but the web server (external users), only by the scanner.

I don't think it's a major issue for the majority of current users and there's a simple work around.

paolobenve commented

putting the albums in a place that is not accessible by the web server will result in an error when trying to download the original image, y whenever an image is shown too, if the screen is smaller that the maximum size of reduced images