Assets in a Lightbox can be published as an external HTML link that can be served to anyone. This is a great way to share collections of assets with third-parties without the need for them to have a login.

Published Lightboxes can be branded with your company logo, a background image, configured to include download sizes and metadata of your choosing and offer password-protection. As users can create multiple lightboxes, they may also have multiple Published Lightboxes.

To get started, add some assets to a lightbox, open the lightbox and click on the 'Publish' link.

The next page will ask you to provide an optional password for your published lightbox, an optional expiry date, along with the ability to choose from download options you have configured for use with this feature.

Here's a quick demonstration of the process of publishing a lightbox:

When viewing a published lightbox, you may download all the assets within it as a single compressed .zip file, or individually by selecting an asset and choosing a size that has been allowed for download. 

Adding/Editing Download Sizes

To change downloadable sizes available to published lightboxes, create a new Usage Type, name this 'For Published Lightbox Use' and configure it with all the Usage Type formats you need for this purpose.

Afterwards, navigate to Admin > Publishing > Lightbox Publishing Actions > Edit lightbox publishing template, click the dropdown next to 'Usage Type for Resizing', then save.

Changing Visible Metadata

As Published Lightboxes are publicly available, you might want to ensure that assets in them do not include any sensitive metadata. You can change the metadata shown on your published lightboxes within Display Attributes.

For the individual view asset pages within a Published Lightbox, navigate to Admin > Attributes > Display Attributes > Publishing > Published lightbox view asset 

Add attributes from the right hand dropdown selection tool. You may also remove any attributes which you do not want to appear on this page.

Note: this page does not control which attributes are shown on the asset panels when browsing a published lightbox; those is controlled within Admin > Attributes > Display Attributes > Publishing > Lightbox

Watermarks

Watermarks can be applied to Published Lightboxes in various ways. Browse to Admin > Publishing > Lightbox Publishing Actions > View/Edit Watermarks. On the next page you'll find the default watermark that applied to this feature on your site. If no watermark is configured, or if you'd like to create a new one, you can do so by clicking Add a new watermark >>

Multiple watermarks can be configured for a single Published Lightbox, within the thumbnail images, asset view pages or downloads.

Please note that updating the watermark settings here can only be done by administrators of the system, and the new configuration will be applied to all existing and future Published Lightboxes.

Expiry Dates

By default, expiry dates for Published Lightboxes cannot be more than 30 days ahead. However, a system change can be made by our support team to increase or decrease this to suit your needs.

Making changes to a Published Lightbox

When you make a change to your Lightbox in Asset Bank the published lightbox is not automatically updated - this is to ensure that the published version remains the same and you cannot accidentally have more assets published than you anticipated.

If you've made changes to any of the above settings (i.e. password, selected assets, etc.) then you can use the "republish" option to update your Lightbox with the latest set of information.

Further reading: Guide to setting up flexible options for Published Lightboxes

Technical Notes for our self-hosted customers:

As Published Lightboxes are served as external links, assets & thumbnails within them are duplicates of the files stored on your Asset Bank. This means more storage space should be allocated to allow for multiple published lightboxes.

If you'd like to change the default maximum expiry date for your Published Lightboxes, change the following setting in ApplicationSettings.properties to a number of your choosing, or 0 for unlimited:

PublishAssetBoxMaxExpiryDays= 

Controlling asset privacy

When publishing a lightbox you are choosing to generate a publically accessible URL to the assets within the given lightbox. This URL is constructed in such a way that it is not "guessable", although we do recommend that you use the password protection function if you there are any sensitive assets within the lightbox. The password should be transmitted securely in a separate message to the lightbox URL in order to minimise the risk of interception. It is possible to restrict which groups have access to the 'publish lightbox' feature when creating or editing a group.