Hello/Hi/Greetings,

I am currently in the process of building a Piwigo site to host content migrated from my Flickr account, and since I can't figure out how to do a photostream-type display for the homepage, I've chosen to display fifty random images from the gallery in order to provide something similar enough.  The problem is that when I'm just displaying images randomly, the way it does it, it polls the albums, and so images that are in multiple albums get multiple entries.  Thus there is the possibility for something to show up on the random homepage display multiple times, which is an undesired result.

I have attempted to work around this in a few different ways.  I tried picking the top album in a hierarchy, and it came up blank because it won't recurse down into the sub-album.  I also tried to see if it would let me pick multiple albums for display, and that only read the first album and stopped.

I also tried an "ALL PHOTOS" album strictly to provide one copy of every image in order to specifically curate the feed, and tried several methods to hide the album from view by regular users by using both Extended Description tags, as well as making it private or throwing it into maintenance mode.  While I can successfully get the album to display the way that I want on the homepage, depending on which way I go about it, I run into different problems.  If I use Extended Description tags to hide it, it still shows up in downstream locations, such as on the photo page itself, which I don't want because that's supposed to be a hidden album, i.e. just for functional purposes, and not for public display.  If I either make it private or put it in maintenance mode, it will still display on the homepage, but then if I click any of the images while I'm logged out, it gives me an error telling me that it is unable to display the image (because it's private or in maintenance mode).

The current string that I'm using to pull the random image feed (that pulls up duplicates) is as follows:

random nb_images=50 size=L link=true html=yes

My environment details are as follows:
Piwigo 14.4.0
Installed on 12 July 2024, 23 hours ago
Operating system: Linux
PHP: 8.2.15 (Show info) [2024-07-13 19:22:42]
MySQL: 8.0.36-0ubuntu0.22.04.1 [2024-07-13 19:22:42]
Graphics Library: ImageMagick 6.9.10-23
Cache size 12.83 MB right now

Piwigo URL: https://piwigo.benschumin.com/

That said, where do I go from here?  I suspect that there is a solution somewhere, but I just don't know what it is.