<?php
$today = (int)date('Yz');
    
srand($today);
    
$files = glob('*/*/thumbs/*.jpg');  // your folder structure goes here, my new one is like 2018/september/thumbs/*.jpg
$file = array_rand($files);

// open the file in a binary mode
$name = $files[$file];
$fp = fopen($name, 'rb');

// send the right headers
header("Content-Type: image/jpeg");
header("Content-Length: " . filesize($name));

// dump the picture and stop the script
fpassthru($fp);
exit;
?>

Embedded like this:

<img src="oftheday.php" alt="[img]">

(If you need to display EXIF information or link to the original image, see this script instead.)

I’ve been working on a revamp of my site! In doing so I’ve been practicing some PHP; one thing I wanted to do was have a randomized image on the homepage that would change every day. Looking around online I didn’t find many drop-in solutions I could just stick on the page, so I pieced together my own; and PHP actually makes it rather simple.

    <?php
        $today = (int)date('Yz');
        srand($today);
    
        $files = glob('photography/*.jpg');
        $file = array_rand($files);
        echo '<a href="[#root#]photography/"><img src="' . $files[$file] . '" alt="Picture of the day" style="border: 3px solid #444"></a>';
    ?>

To explain, $today is set to the current date in the Yz format which is in the form of year and day in the year; for example, if today is 4/6/2020, it would come out to 202097. Tomorrow, it’d be 202098. That is converted from a string into an integer with (int), as it is going to seed PHP’s random number generator with srand(). Otherwise, the output would be random on every refresh.

glob() is then used to get all the jpg files in the photography directory and store that as $files. array_rand() is used to select one item’s index value at random from that array. The filename as $files[$file] is then concatenated and printed into the HTML with echo.

Date Taken/Exif Information

If desired, you can display other information about the image as well later down the page. I’ve done this to show the date the image was taken. This too is fairly simple when you get down to it, provided that your image does have this in its Exif metadata.

<?php
    $exif = exif_read_data($files[$file], 'IFD0');
    $takenDate = strtotime($exif['DateTime']);
    echo date('F j, Y', $takenDate);
?>

exif_read_data() is used to read this information. The DateTime IDF0 attribute is fed into strtotime() so it’s understandable by PHP and then echoed out as a new human-readable format with date(). And that’s about it!

Here’s a place with some more Exif information in case you’re into experimenting. Also check out the PHP documentation.

Here’s a collage I did of the sites in the xxiivv webring. Screenshots were taken and downloaded using this script I hacked up:

import requests
import json
import time

with open("sites.json", "r") as read_file:
    sites = json.load(read_file)
    
    x = -1
    for site in sites:
        x += 1
        print(x, site['url'])
        try:
            r = requests.get("http://image.thum.io/get/noanimate/" + site['url'])
        except:
            time.sleep(2)
            r = requests.get("http://image.thum.io/get/noanimate/" + site['url'])
        title = ""
        try:
            title = "_" + site['title'].replace('\\', '')
        except:
            pass
            
        with open('images/' + str(x) + title + '.png', 'wb') as f:
            f.write(r.content)

They were then fed into this collage maker script to produce the output. Some sites displayed as blank; the only way to work around that would be to use thum.io‘s /wait/ feature; unfortunately that’s only for their registered plans. It still came out neat and I now know of a quick way to make collages.