1 photo a day - Randomise photo order

elpinguino

Hi ExBers,

On the homepage I have an image as the background. It is set up as connected data that pulls from a URL in one of the fields. I want one photo to show each day, and I want the order to be randomised (not in the order they  were entered into the table). Is there an easy way to do this?

I've already thought of a more manual way of doing this - adding in a date field and sorting by order and then filtering by date=today, but what we are trying to avoid here is having two photos from the same photographer show two days in a row. Photographer name is also a field in the hosted table the data pulls from. 

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

 

MappyIan

This is an interesting question.  You don't say how many photographs you have, and if the number of photographs is static or if you will have more/less over time.  Similarly you don't say how many photographers have provided photos and if these will change over time.

If you did a truly random order there is the chance that the photographs on subsequent days would be from the same photographer so the way I see it you have to set the order manually to avoid this.  I think there are a number of options:

• If you only have 7 photographs you could just put them in a table with a 'day' column and always display the same photograph every Monday, etc.
• If you have ~30 photographs, you could put them in a table with a 'day of the month' column and always display the same photograph on the 1st of each month etc.
• If you've <365 photographs you could put them in a table and repeat the sequence up to the number of photographs you have then display them based on a 'day of the year' column/value.

If you wanted to do it in a truly random way you could put all your photographs in a table, then call the Random() function to generate a random number between 0 and the number of records in the table.  See https://support.esri.com/en-us/knowledge-base/how-to-generate-a-random-number-within-a-range-of-numbe-000028949

But, as mentioned above, there's no way to avoid photographs from the same photographer displaying on consecutive days using this method (that I can think of).

Hope this helps.