Pet Visibility

Not every pet in your system should be visible to the public. PawPlacer gives you fine-grained control over which animals appear on your public profile and in embedded widgets.

How Pet Visibility Works

A pet shows up publicly only when all four conditions are met:

Your organization's public profile is enabled
The pet has a public, in-care status, such as Available or another in-care status you've marked public in Settings > Pet Configuration
The pet has at least one photo uploaded
The pet's individual visibility toggle is turned on

If any condition is not met, the pet remains internal only.

The Visibility Toggle

Each pet has an eye icon in the top-right corner of their profile page:

Eye icon (open): the pet is visible to the public
Eye icon (crossed out): the pet is hidden from the public

Click the icon to toggle visibility. When a pet is public, you can also click the clipboard icon next to it to copy the pet's shareable URL to your clipboard.

When the Toggle Is Disabled

The visibility toggle may be grayed out in certain situations:

No public profile: your organization hasn't enabled public visibility yet
No photos: the pet needs at least one photo before it can be shown publicly
Private or out-of-care status: pets with a status that is not marked public, or is marked out of care, can't be displayed

In each case, a tooltip explains what's needed to make the pet eligible.

Staging Multiple Pets

When you change a pet to a public, in-care status and they have a photo, they become eligible for public display; if you want to prepare multiple pets before making them visible, you can:

Add all pet details and photos while keeping visibility toggled off
When ready, toggle each pet's visibility on

This lets you prepare profiles without visitors seeing incomplete listings.

Petfinder Sync

The Petfinder integration is outbound from PawPlacer to Petfinder. It does not import Petfinder-only pets into your PawPlacer public gallery. To show a pet in your PawPlacer public profile or widget, create and manage that pet in PawPlacer and turn on its public visibility.

How Pet Visibility Works

A pet shows up publicly only when all four conditions are met:

Your organization's public profile is enabled

The pet has a public, in-care status, such as Available or another in-care status you've marked public in Settings > Pet Configuration

The pet has at least one photo uploaded

The pet's individual visibility toggle is turned on

If any condition is not met, the pet remains internal only.

The Visibility Toggle

Each pet has an eye icon in the top-right corner of their profile page:

Eye icon (open): the pet is visible to the public

Eye icon (crossed out): the pet is hidden from the public

Click the icon to toggle visibility. When a pet is public, you can also click the clipboard icon next to it to copy the pet's shareable URL to your clipboard.

When the Toggle Is Disabled

The visibility toggle may be grayed out in certain situations:

No public profile: your organization hasn't enabled public visibility yet

No photos: the pet needs at least one photo before it can be shown publicly

Private or out-of-care status: pets with a status that is not marked public, or is marked out of care, can't be displayed

In each case, a tooltip explains what's needed to make the pet eligible.

Staging Multiple Pets

When you change a pet to a public, in-care status and they have a photo, they become eligible for public display; if you want to prepare multiple pets before making them visible, you can:

Add all pet details and photos while keeping visibility toggled off

When ready, toggle each pet's visibility on

This lets you prepare profiles without visitors seeing incomplete listings.