Some time ago my girlfriend and I brought my laptop with us on a visit to my parents in law, to show them the images from our most recent holiday. KPhotoAlbum turned out to be a great success, and it didn't last long before my girlfriends little sister seized the laptop and started browsing around on her own. Unfortunately it didn't take her long either to get to some, let say unfortunate, images of me from my youth, and they all had quite a bit of laugh on me. That episode inspired me to add a new feature to KPhotoAlbum, namely privacy locking.

In the Images menu you will find a sub menu called privacy. To get some privacy, browse - while you are on your own - to the images that you want to keep private, and select Lock Away Current Set of Images from the privacy sub menu. Alternatively you may browse to the images you want to limit your little sister to see, and select Lock Away All Other Images.

Now you have specified what to hide away, and once you hand over your laptop to your little sister, simply choose Lock Images, and your sister will not be able to see the locked images. When done you may unlock them again using Unlock.

It is possible to specify a password that must be entered to unlock the database. In the privacy menu, simply select Change Password to set a password.

Don't get fooled to believe that this will help you hide away images for good. First the images are still on the disk, second, anyone with access to the index.xml file that KPhotoAlbum uses can read the password in clear text and optionally delete it. This feature is only meant as a protection against someone sitting with KPhotoAlbum unintentionally getting to your private images.