disallow direct access to gallery3/var/albums folder

Hallo,

at first of all I want to thank the developers for this pretty tool.

Unfortunately I am a low-level user and stucking in configuring it for my purposes. I'll built up a photo gallery for my family to share images taken with different cameras. I own a webserver, therefore the required webspace is not an issue.

My Problem:
For privacy reasons I don't want to share pictures with the public, otherwise I could also use social networks and so on, therefore I want to disallow any unregistered user. I followed the installation instructions on the gallery3 homepage, but unfortunately direct access to the files via http (gallery3/var/albums) is still possible. Between the lines I have read that I have to adapt the .htaccess or install the apache2 rewrite modul. Does anyone have a small documentation what steps has to be taken? (I installed gallery3 on an ubuntu serer LTS 12.04 and in tasksel I selected LAMP)

I have already googled it for 3 hours, but I have found too many results which confuses me even more. (configurations within php, module of apache2, htaccess, .....)

Thank you four your support in advance!
If you need more information, don't hesitate to contact me.

Michael