Locking a gallery with a password

Setting one

Open the wedding in your dashboard and click the padlock next to the share link. You can take the generated six-character code or type your own — the code is deliberately made from characters nobody misreads, because it gets said down the phone and typed by somebody’s mother.

• The couple is emailed the password automatically, in the same email that carries their gallery link. If you set it before publishing, it rides along with the “your film is ready” email; set it afterwards and they get an email of its own.
• You can see the password any time. It is not hidden from you — when a couple rings six months later having lost it, you read it off the screen. There is also a Resend button for exactly that call.
• Change it whenever you like. Changing it signs out every device that had it and emails the couple the new one, because a password changed silently is a couple locked out of their own wedding.
• Remove the lock and the gallery goes back to being open to anyone with the link.

What the couple sees

They tap their link and land on their own gallery — their names, their date, your studio’s name — with a single box asking for the password. It is not an error page and it does not look like one; it reads as their wedding asking a question.

They type it once per device and are not asked again for thirty days. Phone, laptop, parents’ iPad: once each. If they get it wrong a few times in a row the box pauses for a minute, then longer — that is there to stop someone guessing, and it clears itself as soon as the right password goes in.

What it protects, and what it does not

Worth being precise about, because the distinction matters when a couple asks you.

• It does stop a stranger opening the gallery. If your public portfolio lists your weddings, anyone can see that a wedding exists and click through to it — a locked gallery stops them there, at the password box, with no films and no photographs behind it.
• It does not stop the couple sharing it. The password arrives in the same email as the link, so anyone they forward that email to has both. If you need a wedding kept genuinely close, tell the couple the password separately — say it on the phone — and it becomes something they have to pass on deliberately.
• An Apple TV that has already been paired keeps working. It proved it had the link when it was paired, and it has no keyboard to retype a password on. New pairings ask for the password. If you need a particular television cut off, revoke that device.
• Public embed links and films you have curated onto your portfolio keep playing. Those are served straight from our video host, outside the gallery, which is what makes them embeddable in the first place — no gallery password can reach them. Revoke the embed if you need it gone.

Common questions