Password Protected Photo Galleries

What a password-protected gallery does

Password Protection swaps the gallery for a short form. The visitor gets the form description, a Password field and an Enter button, and no thumbnails, because the gallery never renders. A wrong password answers “The password is incorrect.” A correct one sets a cookie for that gallery, good for 30 days, so the same browser walks straight in on the next visit.

WordPress has a post password of its own in the Publish panel, and it hides the whole page. Use that when nothing on the page is public. A gallery password covers the other case, a public page carrying one locked set, or one page holding a gallery per client. If the client has to pick photos rather than only look at them, build a proofing gallery instead, which is a separate post type with selection limits and an approval email.

Handing a shoot to one client

A client gallery does not need a second service. The photos go on a page of the site the studio already runs, the gallery block draws them, and Password Protection turns that page into a private delivery. The client gets an address and a password, nothing is uploaded anywhere else, and the files stay in the Media Library.

A password belongs to one gallery rather than to the whole site, so a page per shoot keeps two clients apart and withdrawing one is a single field. The cookie a correct password sets is scoped the same way, which is why a client who opened the June wedding does not walk into the August one.

For delivery work, three of the switches below matter more than the rest. The Password Form Description should name the shoot and say who hands the password out. Add Watermarks to Photos means the copy the client can save carries the mark. Right Click Protection takes away the obvious save routes without pretending to be a lock.

What the Protection panel controls

The switches sit in the block sidebar, under Block settings, in the Protection panel. Four of them, all off by default, and they combine. The panel is hidden for the Social content source.

• Password Protection, and the Password field under it. The value is stored as plain text in the block, so anyone who can edit the page can read it.
• Password Form Description, which defaults to “This gallery is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:”. Rewrite it to say who hands the password out.
• Age Gate Protection, with an Age Gate Limit of 18 by default and a range of 1 to 100. Its cookie is shared by every age-gated gallery on the site, while the password cookie covers one.
• Right Click Protection, which blocks the context menu, image dragging, and the Alt-click, Shift-click and Cmd-click download shortcuts on links that point at image files.
• Add Watermarks to Photos, which points the item image, its srcset, the lightbox image and the URL click action at the watermarked copy. Generate the copies first in the Watermarks settings.
• Crawlers whose user agent contains bot, crawl, slurp or spider skip the age gate, so the page stays indexable. They never skip the password.

Locking a gallery in three steps

1. Insert the Visual Portfolio block and pick Media in the setup wizard. Click Add Media, choose the photos, then Select. A post based gallery locks the same way.
2. Open Block settings, then Protection. Switch on Password Protection, fill the Password field, and edit the Password Form Description so the visitor knows who to ask.
3. Publish, then check the page in a private window. The editor preview always shows the gallery and never the form, and your own cookie hides the gate for 30 days afterwards.

Which half of this is Pro

Everything that draws the gallery is free. The Protection panel is not. Pro carries the free plugin inside it, so it is one plugin either way. The whole split is in the free versus Pro comparison, and the license tiers are on the pricing page.

• Free: the Gallery block, the Tiles, Masonry, Grid, Justified and Carousel layouts, the Classic, Fade, Fly and Emerge skins, the lightbox, AJAX filter, sort and pagination.
• Pro: the four Protection switches, password and age gate included.
• Pro: proofing galleries, where the client ticks photos and clicks Send Selection, and you get an email with a link to the approved set.
• Pro: taxonomies and social feeds as content sources, AJAX search, deep linking and white label.

Questions about gallery passwords

Why does the gallery open without asking for the password?

The gate is a front-end feature, and the editor preview never renders it. On the live page, the cookie from your own earlier visit is still good. Open it in a private window, and check that the Password field really holds a value. The fix for a gate that is not shown covers both.

Can I put the same locked gallery on several pages?

Yes. In the block editor, select the block and create a synced pattern. Outside the block editor, save it as a Saved Layout and choose that layout in the Elementor widget or the WPBakery element. Protection is part of the block settings, so the password travels with the gallery. The steps are in reusing the same gallery.

Does a password stop people downloading the photos?

No. Once the form is passed, the images are served like any other image on the site. Right Click Protection blocks the menu and the drag, but not screenshots, developer tools or a typed image URL, which makes it a deterrent rather than a lock. Watermarks hold better, because the visitor is handed the watermarked copy instead of the original.