OK, here goes...

PADLOCKS

First and foremost, I'd like to acknowledge that there is an issue and we are well aware of it. We do not ignore it and we understand that in some situations it may become rather annoying.

Padlocks appeared as a solution to the old privacy implementation in Dolphin, where we used to display photo thumbnails for all photos, and would only secure the large photo by checking individual privacy. So, the system is designed to check privacy setting during display stage, see more and hence it is impossible to effectively check all photos for every specific viewer and adjust result according to privacy match.

So, as a workaround we added those padlocks to hide private content. Additionally, we added "Public Photos" block and now we put most emphasis to it, so padlocks don't appear on, say, pots homepage , unless admin chooses to add blocks with private photos.

In many cases padlocks don't cause any problems, because when the site is mostly for private sharing (like Facebook) web-masters are supposed to turn off those public browsing pages altogether; and when the site is mostly for public sharing (like photographers community, etc) web-masters can rely on "Public Photos" block more and can restrict members from making their content private.

Still, there're many sites where photos have mixed privacy and getting rid of padlocks would be nice, but...

Since privacy is checked when displaying content in almost all Dolphin modules, we would have to basically rewrite large parts of all of them, affecting builders, various settings, modifications, etc, etc. It can be done, but it's a major structural update.

Dolphin 7.1 Osho is not about making big internal changes, however. Our idea for Osho is to take existing system and just clean it up and generally reorganise elements to refresh the look and feel of Dolphin-based sites. This is why we hopeful to be able to be done within weeks, rather than months.

Will we get rid of padlocks in 7.1? No. Too much work to squeeze into what we plan this update to be.

Will we get rid of padlocks in 8? Yes. We've already pretty much killed existing privacy system and we're working out a new, better way to handle it.

Will we get rid of padlocks in 7.x? Maybe. Some solutions that we're using in 8 have already found their way into 7.1, so it is possible that we'd eventually carry over "padlock killer" from 8 to 7.x.

I don't like padlocks. Nobody is too fond of them, but for most they're not a deal breaker. if they are for you, I am really very very sorry and can only suggesting waiting until D8 is out and you'd see if it would work for you. Meanwhile, some smart tweaking may quite effectively conceal the issue (like using "public photos" and "featured photos" in common browsing).

Hope we can live with that for a while. :)