Need a Hack: Find the Random Picture

madeingermany

Hi,

I spent yesterday night trying to find an automated way to directly link the Random Pictures displayed on the Categories Widget on the Home Page and the Category overviews to their place in the Album.

I often times see an interesting picture that I hadn't seen in a long time as the Thumbnail for my albums or categories. I would like to see the bigger version, but it's very hard to find in large albums.

For example
/photos/random.mg?AlbumID=4136778&Size=Tiny&rand=3653
This link does a 302 redirect to the actual image, which has the picture ID, but I could not find a way to access redirection location in JavaScript, because Redirects are handled transparently

I had tried to do something with Greasemonky, but beause of the transparent Redirect that doesn't work.
Anybody has an idea, how this can be accomplished?

Thanks!
Marco

darryl

What widget is this that you speak of?

Or are you just talking about the Categories section?

I posted a complaint about the fact that clicking on random images does not take you to that actual image [thread=1731]way back in 2004[/thread] . There was some discussions, and then I forgot about it, although it seems that I always get re-annoyed about it towards the end of the year and try to revive the thread, to no avail. :-}

madeingermany

Hi darryl,

to clarify what exactly I mean:
If I go to my homepage the blocks
featured galleries and gallery categories will show a random images for each album.
If I go to a specific category the category gallaries block will also show a random image for each album.

I understand that most of the time you will want to go to the album overview/the category you clicked, but it would be great, if I had a way to find the particular image shown.

The easiest soultion would be to generate the home and category pages with static image links....

Thanks,
Marco

darryl

Hi Marco:

If you choose to "Feature Photo" from for a specific gallery, it should show that photo when an album is Featured. The recommendation was to make that photo the first one in the gallery.

However, I do not know how a Category thumbnail is picked. I would guess that if all of the galleries within a Category have a Featured Photo, then it would choose one of those?

But anyways, I don't know how to solve this problem. I too love the random thumbnails, but hate that I can't "click through" to see the full-sized image. At the same time, I understand that the expectation of clicking an thumbnail for a Category may be to take you to the page for that Category.

I suppose the default should be that it takes you to the category, but a slick modification would be for a Javascript pop-up to show up when you hover over the image that gives you the option of linking directly to the photo.

I wonder if that's possible with CSS and Javascript customizations.

--Darryl