As title states - is there a way to restrict the user's ability to set an Album as private, to only those with special or higher Joomla access?

We're trying to prevent users flagging their albums as private, while still being able to use Privacy restrictions on their other fields (like email addresses). Only certain members with special or higher Joomla access should be allowed to create private Albums on our site(s).

To sum up: we want special permission-elevated users to be able to flag albums as private, but not regular users. Privacy still needs to be available on other fields as defined by the Privacy plugin.

I can't currently find a way to do it.

I think I may have confused you, as the steps outlined don't really get me where I need to be. Apologies.

I need to restrict use of the "Private" privacy setting on Albums & album items to only users in chosen Joomla groups. i.e. regular members (Registered user group) should not be able to make an Album or anything inside an Album "Private", but they should still have access to privacy controls for it (Public, Members, Connections, etc).

Is there a way to limit use of the "Private" setting on Albums and items in them to specific Joomla Groups? The end-goal is so that registered users don't create private albums, stuff gigabytes of items into them, and none of it is ever shared with the community. But special users in custom Joomla groups we define should be able to (Admins, Moderators, VIP group users, etc).

That makes me think - we should probably limit the use of "Unpublished" albums and items in them the same way.

Allowing any registered user to use server space & bandwidth that isn't facing the web, just turns the site into a potential file hosting service. Not something we want.