An album with a release date three months out. A film in post. A book under embargo. A rebrand six people know about.
Registering it is the right instinct. What catches people out is assuming a private registration is invisible. It isn’t, and the part that leaks is the part you can’t change afterward.
What private actually hides
Private mode hides the work itself and any preview, the description, and the Dacr AI analysis. Only you and the people you invite can see those.
Everything else stays publicly verifiable, because that’s the point of a register. The filename, the title, the authors, the owners, the registrant, the timestamp and the Dacr ID remain visible whether the registration is public or private.
Which makes the filename the thing to watch
A file called Nightjar_LP_master_final.wav discloses a project name, a format and a status to anyone who looks, on a registration you’ve set to private.
The filename is captured at upload and never changes. The title is seeded from it and can be edited later, so a bad title is fixable and a bad filename isn’t.
Rename before you register. A codename costs nothing, and it’s the only moment where this is a free decision.
Descriptions are the other half
Descriptions written for your own future reference tend to name the client, the campaign and the release window.
On a private registration the description is hidden, so this is less exposed than the filename, but registrations get made public later, often deliberately at release. Write the description as though it will be read, because at some point it probably will be.
Set the default rather than deciding each time
Default file privacy lives in Account settings and applies to everything you register afterward.
If most of what you register is unreleased when you register it, set it there. The failure this prevents isn’t general. It’s getting it wrong once, on the project that mattered, because you were registering at eleven at night before a delivery.
Flip it when the work goes out
Privacy isn’t fixed at registration. A registration can be made public later, and several can be changed together from a multi-selection, which helps when a release involves files registered across months.
So for anything unannounced: private while it’s in progress, public when it ships.
Before your next unreleased project
Check what your default privacy is currently set to, and look at how you name files when you’re in a hurry. The second one matters more, because it’s the half a privacy setting can’t fix.
