Another PHP/MySQL Image question

[ackerley1]

I am working on a site that makes use of pre-made image gallery program and stores the images in a DB. What I want to do is randomly pull an image from the DB, scale it to a certain width, and display it within a block on each page. If possible, have it rotate through after x seconds without waiting for the user to navigate?

Problem is I know very little of DB queries and displaying that information.

Any suggestions?

[philscanlan]

here's a start:

php.net/gd

[fr3nch13]

in your query you can do this:

SELECT * FROM `images` ORDER BY RAND();

that will pull a random entry in the table.

With a where statement:

SELECT * FROM `images` WHERE `active`='Y' ORDER BY RAND();

[imvain2]

Originally Posted by fr3nch13

in your query you can do this:

SELECT * FROM `images` ORDER BY RAND();

that will pull a random entry in the table.

With a where statement:

SELECT * FROM `images` WHERE `active`='Y' ORDER BY RAND();

Actually that isn't correct, those statements will pull back every image in the database but sort them in a random order. You can use those statements and not loop through the results but then you are just wasting system resources for no reason.

select image_url from images where active = 1 order by rand() limit 5;

this select statement will pull back the top 5 randomly selected images. This statement would work well with a slideshow from DynamicDrive.com.

[TrafficProducer]

Scale it to a certain width

ImageMagickTM is a robust collection of tools and libraries to read, write, and manipulate an image in many image formats. (This should help you, it's more powerful the GD, so far as i Know, and works with PHP, PERL etc...

Graphic Video, Hosting image gallerys etc..

PHP Links SQL Links

[DrTandem1]

You don't need a data base for this. A simple directory of images with the script also in the directory. The image on the HTML page is called from the script in that directory.

If you are going to rotate them anyway, just do the same with a PHP slideshow script. The only drawback, to keep it simple, is that the images must all me the same width and height. This is overcome as an issue by finding the largest image, and then setting a background that will contain it. The subsequent, smaller images are simply pasted as a new layer on this background and you then have another image of the same size as the first.

Again, keep it simple, you don't need a database. You can also add hyper links to the images.

[ackerley1]

Thanks for the help... next issue...

Okay, so I have it pulling from the DB using a sql_conn.php file and I have set up the following function (copied from another example I found):

function get_rand_img()
{
// Make the Query
$query = "SELECT image_url FROM images WHERE active = 1 ORDER BY rand() limit 1";
// Run the query
$result = @mysql_query ($query);
// How many are there?
$num = mysql_num_rows($result);
// If it ran okay, display records
if ($num > 0)
{
echo '<table width="100%" border="1" cellspacing="5" cellpadding="5"><tr><td>';
while ($img = mysql_fetch_array($result))
{
echo '[img]gall/images/'.$img.'[/img]';
}
echo '</td></tr></table>';

}
}

However it is still not showing the image correctly... when I view source from browser... the img take reads like this:
[img]gall/images/Array[/img]

Like I said, very limited knowledge with DB queries, so I am sure this is a simple error.

Please help.

Rob