olidie wrote:Would it be easier to make the gallery assets entry random in the sense of picking a different one of the subfolders every time the main gallery is accessed?
Are you asking if this would be easy to implement? In the current state of X3, pages get "rendered" into cache, which means all page html output gets pre-created (after first visit), and successive visits to the page are therefore lightning-fast. As you may understand, this is not compatible with selecting different random gallery inputs per-visit, as this would require re-compiling galleries on a per-visit basis. Technically, your suggestion does make sense if it's to only load images from a single folder, but this still means you are bypassing cache for this random-page, which would have to re-compile itself on each visit to create random output for each visit. Besides, even if it picks only a SINGLE subfolder every visit (instead of multiple), it would still need to loop all images and extract all image-data from that subfolder. Unfortunately, this is therefore not currently an option in X3.
As mentioned in previous reply, it could be an option in the future, but only after some major changes. For example, cache might get stored in json files, which can then be shared, making dynamic pages faster (although never as fast as completely pre-rendered pages like in current X3). Something for the future.
For now, your options are limited. Why not create a hidden folder with the entire pool of random images you want to display? Then assign this folder as "assets" folder, set an X "limit" for the amount to display, and set sort to "shuffle". The page will be fast because it gets pre-rendered and cached, yet it will display X random images, different for each visit, randomized by Javascript from the pool of available images.