Discover: Display a random set of pictures

[tonydub]

Hi,

We could rediscover and enjoy memories you haven't seen in years by displaying a random "sample" of images with a new "Random" option among the possible choices in "Sort By" list.

[lastzero]

Great idea! Since we still change the database and index a lot, we don't test with many pictures - but for large collections, a random view makes sense.

[tonydub]

Glad to see how this project will evolve.

[lastzero]

Our idea is to add a "Discover" area where you can find photos by similarity, by color, by season or just random. This is a very first draft:

Adding a random option to the regular search might turn out to be tricky as it needs to work together with the other filters and with all database backends. When doing a database search, you want to make the result set as small as possible to fit everything in memory. So first selecting as much as possible just to randomly change position (basically removing results from the top) is not a good strategy. In fact you expect a different result every time you click the search button plus when you scroll down to load additional results, photos must not repeat. Maybe easier done in Go and then just tell the db to return the randomly selected IDs, although I didn't spend much time investigating other solutions just yet (given the amount of other work we have to do).

[lastzero]

Added more tabs to get a better impression:

[lastzero]

FYI: Discover area probably won't be part of the release as we received very little feedback and no pull requests so far.

[JamesSwift]

Would it be possible to implement just the "random sort" option in search view as the discover feature is not going ahead? Even if it is "truly random" and not the "pseudo random" where we expect to always see different images. The idea of continually scrolling and seeing more and more random images would be great.

While assessing different solutions for self hosting photos I tried PhotoStructure. PhotoPrism is better and has a better roadmap IMO, but one thing I loved was that the home view of PhotoStructure defaulted to random. I found so many nice memories while trying it out.

[bernsel]

We would be happy to sponsor a "random photos" feature in PhotoPrism. We think it is a great idea. A use case scenario could be a family that has taken tens of thousands of pictures over the years, and would like an evening of watching say 500 random pictures. It would be nice to be surprised by old memories, perhaps from folders you would not normally revisit.

An important aspect of a "random gallery" or "random slideshow", is that it should be possible to select which folders to include to sample random images from. Let's say images are organized in a folder structure on disk with Years as the top structure, and then subfolders for Events under each Year. It should be possible to select "only sample images from years 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020" or "only include images from these subfolders / tree-branches". This could be accomplished by means of tickboxes in a tree structure.

Could we get in direct contact, and discuss appropriate funding offline?

[graciousgrey]

@bernsel feel free to reach out via hello@photoprism.app