Hi all,

I've got a table with people information, and a second table with photos regarding those people. The people could have one or more photos.
My problem is to get a random photo for each person.

Does anyone have an idea...

Many thanks.

Do you need a random photo for one person, or a group of people (one photo each)?

a need a random photo for everyone (1 person 1 photo)

have a look at the MySQL RAND function

you will need to take appropriatye note of the performance implications of using rand to select images

it may work on a subselect

Does RAND not just return a single value per dataset, rather than per row?
(I'd love to look it up in the link you posted, but dev.mysql doesn't seem to load from this location!)

I'll try to dig out some code I've used before.. it grabs random images (well URL's to images) from a MySQL DB. IIRC the code grabbed 30 images from a pool of 5000+. it was used on a website to display the range of products sold, although we only used 15.. the over was to allow for images that were not found when the script actually ran (to avoid having to go fetch another random selection of images).

....just checked
its a standard SQL select statement with an order by clause of
however there is a note in the MySQL manual that Rand can be a resource hog... we use it to grab 32 images once, not grab a random image for every person.. I suspect this will have a significant performance impact (assuming this is a live requirement and not a piece of homework).