Random 'unique' images using image_get_random()

yah it is it's part of drupal API. I don't care how it's done, I just want the random images to be unique. If I grab 10 images, I want them to all be different. It looks kind of lame to have duplicate, or even triplets of the same image up. It looks broken, and not by design.

I did try this but cast it off as being "wrong" because after trying to use it I was still seeing duplicate images be pulled up. I wasn't sure why so I thought maybe the mySQL statement was wrong. Looks like the use of the function was breaking the distinct randomness of the array pull.

I was doing this:

$time_get = time();
$thumbs = 0;
while ($thumbs<50) {
$images = (image_get_random($count = 1, $tid = 0));
print "<div>";
$img = theme('imagecache', 'square100', $images[0]->images['preview']);
print l($img, $images[0]->images['preview'], array('title'=>$images[0]->title,'rel'=>'lightbox[side_'.$time_get.']'), NULL, NULL, FALSE, TRUE);
print "</div><p>".$images[0]->title."</p>";
$thumbs++;
}

When I should have been doing this.

$time_get = time();
$images_arr = (image_get_random($count = 5, $tid = 0));
	foreach ($images_arr as $images){
print "<div>";
$img = theme('imagecache', 'square100', $images->images['preview']);
print l($img, $images->images['preview'], array('title'=>$images->title,'rel'=>'lightbox[side_'.$time_get.']'), NULL, NULL, FALSE, TRUE);
print "</div>";
}

See the results here (on the right hand side):
http://www.engr.sjsu.edu/about/gallery

As well as part of an xml output for a flash app here:
http://www.engr.sjsu.edu/flash_interface.php

FYI this fix should be committed, I don't know why you'd want random "duplicate" images. I could only see this being a problem if you were requesting more images than existed in a gallery. Even then wouldn't the db pull just be truncated.

Yah I think the patch is good, I didn't actually use it, but I made the same changes in my image.module for the function. I think this change should be made to the module and not just be a patch. Not to sound like a broken record, but I really can't see why you'd want random 'duplicate' images, so I think using DISTINCT in the sql statement is a necessity, not sure why nobody saw this earlier.

Olythebest: It could be the way you are calling it. Can you explain where/how you are calling it? I was using it in a custom block as described above, and using a while statement wrapped around the function and calling the function at each loop instead of one db call and then doing a for loop on the array output. If you are also trying to grab more images than you have in image gallery it could also return duplicate images (but I think with DISTINCT maybe not).

Drewish: I completely understand, I just don't typically like using the patches since they themselves can be broken and bork my already made modifications to my modules. (obviously backing up the module would be in order). I do think this modification is worthwhile so hopefully it sticks.

As I suspected, this is exactly the snippet of PHP I was using. If this modifcation gets committed to the module, that handbook page needs to be edited in a bad way. I already added a comment on the page about how it's not the best method anyways.

So back to the point, your PHP should look like this:

<?php
  $gallery_name='Footer Images';
  $term = taxonomy_get_term_by_name($gallery_name);
  $tid = $term[0]->tid;
  $thumbs = 8;
$images_arr = (image_get_random($count = $thumbs, $tid = 0));
foreach ($images_arr as $images){
  print l(image_display($images, 'preview'),'', array(), null, null, FALSE, TRUE);
}
?>

As you can see doing this only makes one db query, and then loops through the output array of the db query, much more efficient, and it will get you the results you are looking for.