No way to view private posts on blog or filter by tag (on blog or dashboard)

[ssssamstrup]

I'd like to request a feature for making the private posts more useful.

Right now you can mark posts private, which makes them hidden on your blog both when logged in and for visitors. After setting a post to private it can only be found by scrolling through your dashboard or through the mass editor. There is no way to filter private posts. Neither as private posts or when browsing tagged posts on your blog. Since posts can't be browsed by tag on the dashboard, it's not possible there either. This results in private posts getting lost in the stream of other posts, with no way to easily find them again.

For blogs with a lot of posts, not being able to filter private posts and see them along with other posts when browsing tags (when logged in) makes the private post feature quite useless in most cases. Unless you want to scroll through pages and pages of posts on your dashboard or in the mass editor, these posts gets lost to time.

Tumblr has strong filtering system to counter this, especially using tags. Being able to see private posts when logged in and browsing the blog would make the feature a lot more useful. Being able to filter private posts (like non-private posts) with tags would also make them very easy to find again. If this was implemented and you wanted a simple way to filter only all private posts, it could be done by adding a special tag just to them.

Since private posts can be seen in the Mass editor an interim work-around could also be adding tag-filtering to the Mass editor. This would be less useful than making private posts visible when logged in, but more useful than the current implementation. However it is still quite a workaround.

I understand that the idea must be: Private = not shown on blog. However there are lots of cases where this creates an issue for users expecting Private = just shown to me when I'm logged in; In the same way the users use, find and edit all other posts on my blog.

Example:
I have a blog where this would be very useful. All posts on the blog are tagged for categorisation and the most used tags are linked on the blog using /tagged/[tag] links at the top. I'd like to be able to use the same categorisation for private posts, but when I view tagged posts (fx. posts tagged hjem), the private posts are hidden. When trying to view a tag with only private posts, it redirects to the tumblr 404 page.
I use the blog to be able to categorise and send links to posts, for friends and family to browse, so making the whole blog private doesn't work for me. For certain posts (gifts for friends and family and stuff I'd like to post privately for reference) it's useful for me to be able to private the posts, so only I can see them. With the current private post implementation this is not possible.

The only feasable solution for me currently would be to make an identical blog with the same features and design, and mark it private. And then save just my private posts to it. This would mean I would have to maintain two identical sites and cross-reference tags on each when looking for a post.
A cumbersome solution, hence I hope you'll reconsider the current implementation or adding a toggle for users expecting to see and filter all their posts (including private) when logged in.

Thank you for attending my TED talk :)