DAM Guide – Managing user rights for photo sharing

To grant each user or group of users the correct permissions, it’s essential to first study the needs of users before assigning them rights. Of course, these initially assigned rights can always be changed as long-term needs evolve. Likewise, a modification of rights for a limited time—for example, while carrying out a project—is no problem with digital asset management or photo library software.

When determining the rights of each group of users, it’s essential to really consider why certain rights should be limited for certain users. Indeed, limiting user rights without good reason, particularly when rights are limited for people who need them for their work, can result in a lot of wasted time. For example, limiting a communications manager’s right to distribute albums would make no sense. Such a limitation would waste a significant amount of time since the communications manager has to share albums on social media, for example, and would thus have to send a request to the group manager every time. Conversely, preventing an accountant from distributing albums would not cause any issues for their work and could even prevent them from causing harm to the company by distributing content that they’re not supposed to, being unfamiliar with the communications policies.

The photo library administrator is in charge of managing user rights. They supervise user accounts and can create group or individual profiles. Each profile corresponds to a set of rights and/or limitations for photo sharing. The administrator is responsible for configuring groups, then adding users or removing them. Group profiles make it much simpler to manage user rights. Group profiles make it possible to assign user rights to a large number of people all at once. As such, you only have to go about assigning rights once.

While all users in a group have the rights configured for the group, it’s possible for certain people within a group to have their photo sharing rights personalized. Similarly, it’s possible to temporarily take away all photo sharing rights for certain users. For example, the Ephoto Dam software allows you to suspend an account, temporarily deactivating it (until a set date or indefinitely) and thus preventing that user from sharing photos.

Configuring user rights involves choosing group managers, assigning photo sharing permissions for group members, selecting collections and galleries accessible to the group, and assigning usage policies.

Group managers are group members who have a personalized profile giving them additional photo sharing rights. The group manager may have to manage users in the group, collections, the trash, indexing, publications by users in the group, and export requests.

In Ephoto Dam, there are three types of rights for group managers: group administration, indexing and publication, and order control. Each right can be given to a single person or shared by several users; similarly, a group manager can have just one of these rights or all three.

For all users, generic rights are set for importing photos, distributing albums, downloading (exporting), indexing, publishing, and deleting. The collections of files for which users have rights are selected while configuring the group. For a single user group, the rights granted for sharing photos may vary from one collection to the next.

Finally, the configuration of user rights can also include the assigning of policies. In other words, the sharing of photos and access to certain rights can be made conditional on accepting usage policies. In that case, the user will be asked to accept the policy when they want to perform an action covered by the policy (import, index, publish, etc.). If the user does not accept, the action they tried to perform will automatically be canceled.