Limiting Number Of Downloads In A Sub Gallery

I shoot dance competitions and what I've been finding is one parent will purchase the rights to the pictures, and then share the gallery access link and password (technically it's actually a sub gallery of the main category) with other parents, downloading all the files of a dance routine multiple times. I can see sometimes as many as 60 IP addresses downloading one gallery. How do I restrict this? I want to have control over how many IP addresses can download a specific sub gallery. It would be great if I could set it to only allowing one IP address (the customer that paid) to download once during a certain period of time (say 7 days). Is this possible? Note: we force sign in/account registration before parents can view the images (so they must have an account registered first).

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How are you selling access to the gallery or sub-gallery? What steps are you taking?

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They purchase the whole routine at the event. I edit, upload to Sytist and then send them an email with the gallery link and password. The price list is a "pre-paid download all" price list for their gallery.

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What I want is to only allow ONE download per registered account.

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There isn't a way to limit downloads to just 1 per account. Really the only way to do it is for them to have an account, assign them to the gallery as free downloads (free downloads tab when in the Photos tab of the gallery in the admin). Then they would log into their account and then download the photos and free downloads aren't assigned to the price list.

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I’ll have to check out this assigning someone to a gallery. If I assign to a specific person, does that mean no one else can access the pictures? But what happens if he/she shares their email address and account password with others? Then we’re back to the same issue of multiple downloads.

It’s just super frustrating when you have one person pay for the routine, and then you find out like 25 others have downloaded the entire routine too because the link and password was shared with them. I know there’s no perfect way to prevent parents from sharing dance photos of a routine, but I certainly don’t want to make it easy for them. Other than monitoring the gallery itself (who has time for that LOL), I wish that the password would change after one download has happened. That would be awesome!

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Hi Angelica,

I recently did a dance gala and was trying to figure out what would work without runing into this issue. I ended up creating a gallery with watermarks for them to view and then created a price list that had the option to download a free download with watermark on it, paid option without watermark and the option to purchase prints.

When each person would create an order and when I would get it, I would just replace those files that they ordered instead of creating a gallery with a passoword to it. This would then force them to order only the images they wanted instead of giving them all of the images to share. This forces them to create a account to buy them and download them. Then it's easier to control who's downloading them from the site. If they share them after downloading them, then there's nothing we can do after that. I would include a license agreement letting them know that they can't share with anyone that hasn't purchased them too.

Hopefully this helps, I'm sure someone probably has a better way of doing this.

Here is a link to see how I did everything.
https://www.williamspivakphotography.com/oxford-center-for-dance/february-4th-gala-at-hockessin-memorial-hall

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Hi William,

Thank you for your tip. I’ve done that too, and it works great for small orders, but when you’re dealing with a whole routine (typically 150 shots on average), it’s not time-effective. As of now, you can only replace one photo at a time, manually. If there was a “replace all” option on each order, then that would possibly solve my problem. :-)

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Hi Angelica,

When I add photos to a gallery, I add the unedited just basic stuff done. As clients order prints and I reupload them for the order. When reuploading the file, you can replace the current photo that you have in the gallery with the edited one, so when the next person orders it, you dont need to reupload or change it, just approve it so they can download it.

Just thought about this one. I'm not sure if this would work, maybe Tim can comfirm or I can try it out later. If a order comes in and you want to upload all the edited files in one shot, maybe before approving them for download, upload them all back into the same gallery and select the option replace photos with the same file name so when you approve them and it sends the email out they would download right from the gallery without having to replace them on the order page one at a time.

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" upload them all back into the same gallery and select the option replace photos with the same file name so when you approve them and it sends the email out they would download right from the gallery without having to replace them on the order page one at a time.

Yes, this is the way to do it. And in the manage photos tab when viewing the order in the admin, there is an "Allow all photos to be downloaded now" option too.

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