View Full Version : How to find referencing threads for gallery pictures?
Schneiderlein
12-14-2008, 23:17
I have come to like the random images at the top of the page and I quite regularly click on one that catches my interest. Oftentimes, I would like to find out more about the picture and it would be really nice to have links on the picture page to all threads that include a link to the picture. Is this feature available and I just haven't found it yet?
If it is not already there, would it be possible to implement it?
slowhike
12-14-2008, 23:24
Not a bad idea, but as far as I know, it might require the owner of the thread to manually post a link under each picture.
Maybe one of the others will know another way???
I kinda like the random pictures too. Sometimes I click on the "Home" button so it will show 3 new pictures... & again, & again.
An automatic thread tag added to the picture description when a picture is used in a thread? That would be an awesome idea.
Schneiderlein
12-15-2008, 00:25
Not a bad idea, but as far as I know, it might require the owner of the thread to manually post a link under each picture.
Maybe one of the others will know another way???
I kinda like the random pictures too. Sometimes I click on the "Home" button so it will show 3 new pictures... & again, & again.
I think if it's left to the owner, it will probably be hit and miss (like tags). It should be possible to automate this, though. If it is difficult or too time consuming to generate all references each time an image is looked at, maybe a button could be added that generates a search of all threads posted by the owner of the picture. I have tried to search threads for images, but I think the search mechanism currently ignores links inside [img] tags (it actually generates hits if you search for gallery urls or showimg.php urls, but never the right ones). If there is a way to make the search look only for links inside [img] tags, it would be easy to implement.
rock_rat
12-15-2008, 07:15
I think the most resource efficient way to do this would probably be to add a column to the table that holds the links to the images. Then you would modify the "Submit Reply" function to update that column if a forum hosted image is used in the post. I would store all the references as a single string of the post numbers. For instances if a picture is used in three post the value of that column might be "88279;88234;79065". On the gallery side you would simply need to read that column and create the appropriate links. Another option would be to create a new table with two columns. Column one would be the image id and column two would be the post number. This option would require accessing an additional DB table each time the image loads however. All of this presumes that vBulletin doesn't already track this information and that there is a database table for the gallery functions that has an entry for each image uploaded. I've never administered a vBulletin system so if my assumptions are a bit off I apologize.
Inside Checkpoint enterprise firewalls, there is a "where used" feature that you can select any object, right click, and show every rule where an object is used and then click on the "go to" link generated by the search. This is the most useful feature I've ever used in any management software.
I wonder what kind of overhead this would take? The image tags must be linked to the thread somehow already when the images are inserted - it would be a matter of enumerating/reporting the [img] coded thread pointers and displaying the thread link/pointer/reference tag in a pictures details as a new field. Kind of what rock-rat just described.
Schneiderlein
03-04-2009, 13:45
Just wanted to give this a bump. I still think it would be a very useful feature.
headchange4u
03-04-2009, 14:13
Keep in mind that not all the pictures in the gallery have been posted in a thread. A lot of them were pictures that were simply uploaded to the gallery so that forums members could view them.
angrysparrow
03-04-2009, 14:13
There's no realistically easy way to implement this, I'm afraid. I did study how it might be done, but it is way too prohibitive in man-hours to implement.
Schneiderlein
03-04-2009, 14:23
There's no realistically easy way to implement this, I'm afraid. I did study how it might be done, but it is way too prohibitive in man-hours to implement.
AS, thank you for looking into it.