Who Can See Your Catalog? Public, Link-Only and Private Publishing Explained

When a catalog goes digital, most of the attention goes to how it looks. The question that matters just as much is who should be able to open it.

A spring brochure is meant to travel as far as possible. A dealer price list is not. A preview of next season's collection should probably not leave your sales team at all. With a PDF attachment there is no difference between these: once the file is sent, anyone who receives it can open it and pass it on. With a published catalog you can decide, and change your mind later.

Three ways to publish

Public

Anyone who has the catalog's address can open it. This is the right choice for anything you would happily hand out at a trade fair: brochures, lookbooks, product catalogs, magazines.

Link only

The catalog opens only through its share link, which contains a secret part that cannot be guessed. Without that exact link, the catalog cannot be opened.

Use this when the audience is specific but does not have an account with you: a price list for dealers, a proposal for one client, a preview for journalists before a launch.

Links get forwarded, so plan for it. If a link-only catalog reaches people it should not, reset the share link. The old link stops working immediately, and you send the new one to the people who should have it. The catalog itself, its address and its statistics stay the same.

Private

Only signed-in members of your own workspace can open it. Use this while a catalog is being reviewed, or for material that is strictly internal.

Anyone else who tries to open a private catalog, and anyone who tries a link-only catalog without the right link, sees a plain "page not found". That is deliberate: an "access denied" message would confirm that something exists there.

Taking a catalog offline

Sometimes the right audience is nobody. A campaign has ended, a price list has expired, or something in the catalog is simply wrong.

Deactivating a catalog takes it offline everywhere, whatever its visibility: the link stops working and so does every embed on your website. Nothing is deleted. The catalog, its statistics and its settings stay in your account, and you can switch it back on at any time.

Compare that with a PDF: an emailed file with last year's prices keeps circulating for as long as someone has it.

Embedding is a separate switch

Putting a catalog on your own website is controlled separately from visibility, in two places:

• each catalog has its own embed switch, so you decide catalog by catalog what can appear on a website;
• your workspace has a list of allowed domains. An embedded catalog only loads on those sites. Adding a domain covers its subdomains too, so yourbrand.com also covers shop.yourbrand.com. If someone copies your embed code onto another site, the catalog does not load there.

Because the two are separate, a private catalog with embedding switched on still shows on your allowed domains, and Flipable reminds you of this when you choose it. That combination is useful: if your website has a members-only area, embed a private catalog there and your website's own login decides who sees it.

What these settings cannot do

Access settings control who can open a catalog. They do not control what a reader does once it is open. Anyone who can read a page can take a screenshot of it, and anyone who has a link-only catalog can forward the link until you reset it.

So treat them as what they are: a way to keep a catalog in front of the right audience, not a vault. Contracts, personal data and anything genuinely confidential do not belong in a page-turning catalog, whatever the setting.

A quick guide

• Brochure, lookbook, product catalog: public.
• Dealer or partner price list: link only; reset the link each season.
• Proposal for a single client: link only.
• Next season's preview for your sales team: private.
• Catalog inside a members-only area of your website: private, with embedding on and your site in the allowed domains.
• Expired campaign or a catalog with an error: deactivate it, fix it, switch it back on.

How this works in Flipable

Visibility, link resets and deactivation are available on every plan, including the free one, and only the workspace owner can change them. Team members can open private catalogs but cannot change these settings. The number of domains you can allow for embedding depends on the plan: one on Free, Starter and Pro, two on Growth and three on Business.

For the embedding side in detail, see How to Embed a Digital Publication on Your Own Website. And if you are still deciding whether to publish your catalog this way at all, PDF Catalog vs. Flipbook covers what changes and what does not.