[GMG-Devel] May I set content as private in a mediagoblin instance?

[Jorge Arévalo]

Hello devs,

I've been looking for services to store my family photos&videos, keeping the ownership of my data, and I came across mediagoblin. As a Libre Software advocate and programmer, I love the idea.

So, I deployed my own mediagoblin instance, and now I'm trying to change privacy settings. I see all content is public by default, but I do not want my family pics & videos to be public. The thing is I can't find an obvious way to make them private, and I'd like to provide this service to other members of my family with poor computer skills. They can easily share pictures and videos with flickt or youtube. I want them to do it with mediagoblin too.

I've been looking for privacy settings options in documentation but can't find them. So, is it possible to make pics & videos private? A config setting I'm missing?

Thanks people!

Best regards,

Jorge

Sent from [ProtonMail](https://protonmail.com), Swiss-based encrypted email.

[ayleph]

Post by Jorge Arévalo
Hello devs,
I've been looking for services to store my family photos&videos, keeping
the ownership of my data, and I came across mediagoblin. As a Libre
Software advocate and programmer, I love the idea.
So, I deployed my own mediagoblin instance, and now I'm trying to change
privacy settings. I see all content is public by default, but I do not
want my family pics & videos to be public. The thing is I can't find an
obvious way to make them private, and I'd like to provide this service
to other members of my family with poor computer skills. They can easily
share pictures and videos with flickt or youtube. I want them to do it
with mediagoblin too.
I've been looking for privacy settings options in documentation but
can't find them. So, is it possible to make pics & videos private? A
config setting I'm missing?
Thanks people!

Hi Jorge,

Thanks for your interest in MediaGoblin. You're not missing a
configuration setting; there is no setting to make media private. This
is a feature that has been requested by many people but hasn't been
implemented in MediaGoblin itself yet. But I can offer you a couple of
options to restrict access to your site if you're able to do some of the
work yourself.

If you're using a web server to provide a reverse proxy or fcgi/wsgi
connection to your MediaGoblin instance, then you can configure
authentication in your webserver with an htpasswd file. Please refer to
your webserver's documentation for how to configure this.

Another option is that you could try to modify the MediaGoblin code
itself to lock down the root view and the media views. This won't
prevent someone from sharing the direct link to a file, but it prevents
other people from browsing the site. To require someone to be logged in
to see a "view," you can add the @require_active_login decorator to that
view's function definition. For example, if you look at the
default_root_view function in 'mediagoblin/views.py', you'll see that it
already has the @user_not_banned and @uses_pagination decorators. You
could probably add @require_active_login to prevent people from seeing
the root view when not logged in. You would also need to add this to
many of the view function definitions in
'mediagoblin/user_pages/views.py', and maybe some of the other
'views.py' files such as 'mediagoblin/listing/views.py' which contains
the atom feed.

I hope this helps. Let us know if you need help trying to implement or
test either of these ideas.

Thanks,

[Jorge Arévalo]

-------- Original Message --------

Subject: Re: [GMG-Devel] May I set content as private in a mediagoblin instance?
Local Time: 26 December 2017 4:02 PM
UTC Time: 26 December 2017 15:02

Post by Jorge Arévalo
Hello devs,
I've been looking for services to store my family photos&videos, keeping
the ownership of my data, and I came across mediagoblin. As a Libre
Software advocate and programmer, I love the idea.
So, I deployed my own mediagoblin instance, and now I'm trying to change
privacy settings. I see all content is public by default, but I do not
want my family pics & videos to be public. The thing is I can't find an
obvious way to make them private, and I'd like to provide this service
to other members of my family with poor computer skills. They can easily
share pictures and videos with flickt or youtube. I want them to do it
with mediagoblin too.
I've been looking for privacy settings options in documentation but
can't find them. So, is it possible to make pics & videos private? A
config setting I'm missing?
Thanks people!

Hi Jorge,
Thanks for your interest in MediaGoblin. You're not missing a
configuration setting; there is no setting to make media private. This
is a feature that has been requested by many people but hasn't been
implemented in MediaGoblin itself yet. But I can offer you a couple of
options to restrict access to your site if you're able to do some of the
work yourself.
If you're using a web server to provide a reverse proxy or fcgi/wsgi
connection to your MediaGoblin instance, then you can configure
authentication in your webserver with an htpasswd file. Please refer to
your webserver's documentation for how to configure this.
Another option is that you could try to modify the MediaGoblin code
itself to lock down the root view and the media views. This won't
prevent someone from sharing the direct link to a file, but it prevents
other people from browsing the site. To require someone to be logged in
view's function definition. For example, if you look at the
default_root_view function in 'mediagoblin/views.py', you'll see that it
the root view when not logged in. You would also need to add this to
many of the view function definitions in
'mediagoblin/user_pages/views.py', and maybe some of the other
'views.py' files such as 'mediagoblin/listing/views.py' which contains
the atom feed.
I hope this helps. Let us know if you need help trying to implement or
test either of these ideas.
Thanks,
ayleph

Hi Ayleph,

Thanks for your quick response and your proposals. Decorating the views sounds interesting for my use case.

To be honest, the perfect solution for me would be a dropdown / radiobutton to choose if I want the content to be private or public, but as I'm just uploading family videos, for the time being, the decorator solution is good enough.

Just out of curiosity, is this feature part of the roadmap? Looks like mediagoblin is a software centered on the "community" aspect, and what I really have in mind is more "a web app to handle my video collection", with focus on access control.

I'm currently using NextCloud as Dropbox replacement, to store docs and photos I take with my phone, but don't have a solution for video. As Python programmer, I may try to contribute to the project and implement this "private / public" feature. I mean, if there aren't other folks already working on it.

I think I have a lot to read, anyway :-D

http://mediagoblin.readthedocs.io/en/latest/devel/codebase.html
https://wiki.mediagoblin.org/Feature_Ideas
https://issues.mediagoblin.org/report/1?sort=created&asc=0&page=1

Best regards,

Jorge

[Mike Macgirvin]

Hubzilla provides decentralised cross-domain media privacy using public
key authentication. There's also a way to provide dropbox style access
if you want.

Post by Jorge Arévalo
-------- Original Message --------

Subject: Re: [GMG-Devel] May I set content as private in a
mediagoblin instance?
Local Time: 26 December 2017 4:02 PM
UTC Time: 26 December 2017 15:02
Hello devs,
I've been looking for services to store my family photos&videos, keeping
the ownership of my data, and I came across mediagoblin. As a Libre
Software advocate and programmer, I love the idea.
So, I deployed my own mediagoblin instance, and now I'm trying to change
privacy settings. I see all content is public by default, but I do not
want my family pics & videos to be public. The thing is I can't find an
obvious way to make them private, and I'd like to provide this service
to other members of my family with poor computer skills. They can easily
share pictures and videos with flickt or youtube. I want them to do it
with mediagoblin too.
I've been looking for privacy settings options in documentation but
can't find them. So, is it possible to make pics & videos private? A
config setting I'm missing?

[Jorge Arévalo]

Mmmm... interesting. If I find a way to store and reproduce video (it just allows uploading it as any other file), I think this would be a great solution.

Thanks!

Sent from [ProtonMail](https://protonmail.com), Swiss-based encrypted email.

Post by Jorge Arévalo
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [GMG-Devel] May I set content as private in a mediagoblin instance?
Local Time: 26 December 2017 11:08 PM
UTC Time: 26 December 2017 22:08
Hubzilla provides decentralised cross-domain media privacy using public key authentication. There's also a way to provide dropbox style access if you want.

Post by Jorge Arévalo
-------- Original Message --------

Subject: Re: [GMG-Devel] May I set content as private in a mediagoblin instance?
Local Time: 26 December 2017 4:02 PM
UTC Time: 26 December 2017 15:02

Post by Jorge Arévalo
Hello devs,
I've been looking for services to store my family photos&videos, keeping
the ownership of my data, and I came across mediagoblin. As a Libre
Software advocate and programmer, I love the idea.
So, I deployed my own mediagoblin instance, and now I'm trying to change
privacy settings. I see all content is public by default, but I do not
want my family pics & videos to be public. The thing is I can't find an
obvious way to make them private, and I'd like to provide this service
to other members of my family with poor computer skills. They can easily
share pictures and videos with flickt or youtube. I want them to do it
with mediagoblin too.
I've been looking for privacy settings options in documentation but
can't find them. So, is it possible to make pics & videos private? A
config setting I'm missing?