Guides - using PhotoLog
Practical walkthroughs for the things you will actually do in PhotoLog: getting a library in, keeping it organised, sharing an album, and sending finished work to a client.
Which one to read first
The four guides are ordered the way the work usually happens - get a library in, keep a second copy of it, share part of it, hand a finished piece of it over - but almost nobody arrives at the start. Pick by what you're actually doing:
- You are moving a library out of another service. Start with uploading and organizing your library, and read the part about capture dates before you upload anything. Dates lost on the way in are the one thing that can't be repaired afterwards.
- Your photos are already in and you want to show someone. Creating and sharing a private album explains what a share link grants, and why PhotoLog uses a link rather than a password you choose.
- You are delivering paid work. Delivering finished work to a client covers the hand-off itself and what the client sees when they open the link.
- You are worried about losing something. Backing up your library and setting up storage is the one to read early rather than late. It's the one that names the PhotoLog failure that cannot be undone, and the two cheap things that prevent it.
Three words these guides use throughout
All four guides lean on the same three nouns. They're worth having straight before you start, because the structure you choose in the first week is the structure you live with.
- Studio - your workspace, and the thing members belong to. Every account has one and an account can hold several: a family studio, a work studio, one kept to yourself. A studio is a piece of the product, not a kind of customer.
- Vault - a separation boundary inside a studio. A vault is the unit of sharing and of key rotation, so it is where the question "who should be able to see this?" gets answered.
- Album - an arrangement inside a vault, and what a share link points at. An album is private until you make a share for it.
Which of the three you reach for, and in what order, is a decision you make in the first week and live with afterwards - uploading and organizing your library is where it gets made in practice.
What these guides do not cover
- How the encryption itself works - the key hierarchy, what PhotoLog's servers can still see, and where the honest limits are. That's how encryption works, and the guides link to it rather than restating it.
- The questions people ask before they trust anyone with a photo library - who owns what you upload, what a family library needs that a client gallery doesn't, and how to put the same questions to any other provider. Those are in security, which is where to go if you arrived here from an article rather than from the product.
- Collecting photos from guests at an event, which is a different job from sharing an album you assembled yourself - see events.
- Storage amounts and what each plan includes - see pricing.