Restrict privacy on Albums in Gallery to Special users and above

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.

Ensure CB Privacy and CB Auto Actions are installed next within CB Auto Actions > System Actions publish the below system actions.

CB Gallery - Privacy - Edit
CB Gallery - Privacy - Save
CB Gallery - Privacy - Authorized

This will enable privacy controls for gallery albums and gallery media. As for what privacy options are available it uses the defaults configured in CB Privacy > Parameters. If you only want super users to be able to configure privacy you'll have to modify the system actions. The best way to do this is do not publish the following system actions.

CB Gallery - Privacy - Edit
CB Gallery - Privacy - Save

Next select their checkboxes and click Copy. You should now have a copy of these system actions in CB Auto Actions > Auto Actions. Now you can publish them and change their Access parameters to All Moderators. This should display the privacy controls only to CB Moderators, but the privacy check will be applied to everyone.

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.

Yes, that's doable. You can select a view access level per privacy rule. You can do this globally within CB Privacy > Parameters > Privacy > Rules or you can perform the steps above and make copies of those system actions and leave Access alone, but adjust the Access parameters under Rules within the action. This will determine who can select that privacy rule.