Anyway

Word­Press was designed for pub­lic web­sites, not private ones, so pass­word pro­tec­tion can be a little clunky. For­tu­nately there are plu­gins to help, but (as always) there are trade-offs to be made. 

When all you want to do is add a pass­word to stop search engines index­ing and out­siders read­ing the con­tent, but you also want make it as easy as pos­sible for people to use, there’s the Pass­word Pro­tec­ted plu­gin. As it says, it does­n’t pro­tect the images or oth­er uploaded content.

If you also want to pro­tect the media, you will need to give people an account on the Word­Press site (with user­name and pass­word). Then you can use the htac­cess edits detailed at http://www.idowebdesign.ca/wordpress/password-protect-wordpress-attachments/. This works, but in many cases you just don’t want to give lots of people accounts on the sys­tem, or make groups of people share an account. So it’s a trade-off — how import­ant is pass­word-pro­tect­ing the images versus the admin­is­tra­tion over­head of user accounts with the asso­ci­ated username/password ease of use issues? If you do want to use user­names and pass­words, per­haps giv­ing a group of people a shared account, I’d recom­mend also using one of the plu­gins that helps with finer-grained access con­trol, such as Mem­bers, to stop people being able to change things you don’t want them chan­ging (such as pass­words for the shared account).