Unfortunately, that is not possible. The closest thing is to log in as each new user and disable their user album on their account profile page. But they can always turn it back on, so this may not be of much help.

What you can do is disable user albums. When a user requests a personal album, manually create one and set them as the owner (double click the album header to bring up the edit album popup).

That is the exact same thing GSP does when you enable user albums, except GSP does it for everyone.

The checkbox you imagine already exists. It is on the user's account page and it is labeled "Enable my user album". I think what you need, though, is the option to have this unchecked by default. That is, user albums would be enabled at the system wide level but disabled for each individual user, UNLESS the user activates it on their account page. Currently, GSP is hard-coded to always create a user album when the system setting is enabled. Only when a user unchecks this box does their user album disappear.

There could be an option for administrators called "Automatically create each user's album". It would be true by default, which provides behavior the same as currently. If you uncheck it, then you get the behavior described above.

What do you think? This would be pretty easy to implement.

Hey, good news! You can edit web.config to disable each user's album by default. Look for this line:



Change the default value to false:



I did a little testing and it looks like it does what you want. Let me know what you think.

Hi Roger

Never mind. I had left EnableUserAlbum set to false when I did the new install. I set it properly and there it was.

Thanks

Richard

I can't repro it. When you click the checkbox and hit save, the user album won't be created until the *next* page load. This is because I am saving the setting in the first step, and letting the normal user album validation create the album on the next page load. Perhaps this is what you are noticing?

One can argue I should do both things upon saving so that the Go to my album button appears at the top right, but that was extra work. :-) Maybe one of these days when I am resting...

Can you confirm that after you check the box and save, you navigate to another page *before* checking for the existence of the user album?

Hmm, not sure what is going on there. The gallery ID should never conflict with the album ID, even when they are the same value, because they are different entities. The setting userAlbumParentAlbumId will be "0" whenever user albums are disabled.

Glad you got it. Now it is back to writing the Admin Guide...

Maybe I should leave well enough alone, but I can't resist...

First, user albums are enabled/disabled through the setting enableUserAlbum. When this setting is false, GSP puts a "0" in the setting userAlbumParentAlbumId, but it shouldn't matter because that setting should always be ignored when enabledUserAlbum="false".

Second, when you upgraded from 2.3.3421, there were two upgrade techniques:

1. Keep your existing gsp.config and paste in the new settings.
2. Rename your original file to galleryserverpro_old.config and use the upgrade wizard to import the settings.

In either case your original settings should have migrated to the new version. Did you perhaps follow a third, ahem.. undocumented upgrade path?