I chose a set of 5 images I want to use for my landing page (Gallery) slider. I placed them in an unpublished album since I don't want that album displayed in the gallery but just have those images displayed as the slider. But rather 5 random images from the Gallery are chosen.

I don't fully understand the concept of known vs unknown users but the unpublished album is shown when I select View Gallery as the admin user but when an unknown (incognito browser) window hits the web page 5 random images are chosen from the Gallery instead of the images from the unpublished album.

Is this intentional? I seem to recall reading that the principal of unpublishing images could be used to hide them from albums but use them for thumbnails and the like - hoping this extended to the slider images too.

@vincent3569 will be able to better respond how that slider works. Try having the album unpublished but the images published.

Generally unpublished items can only be views by knowing the direct link. Unless you are a full admin or user with rights then you will see them. See https://www.zenphoto.org/news/an-overview-of-zenphoto-users/#--rules-of-protection-and-visibility-for-zenphoto- for details

Code calls may naturally bypass the status and fetch and display them nevertheless.

Thanks - the link helps to explain the relationship between the user and the state of the photo.

Unfortunately unpublished album and published photo makes no difference - the photos are not displayed in the slider - it still takes random photo from gallery (only for unknown user - works as I would want for the admin) - well sort-of. The unpublished album "slider" also shows up for the admin in the Gallery but of course not for incognito browser window.

What is the protocol - do I wait for vincent3569 to comment or do I contact him directly somehow ? Seems he doesn't visit every day according to his profile.

Vincent may not visit every day but does regulary read here. I also have mentioned him above so the forum should notify him about that.

Alternatively you can also use the tickets on his theme's GitHub repository.

Very good - thanks. I will give him some time to respond. I will discuss with him if my goals are consistent with his ideas for the theme or if I should take this offline or consider my own variation of his theme.

hi
for my slider, i have an unpublished dynamic album whitch contains published pictures with "slider" tag.
I haven't time to have a look further but I use `getRandomImagesAlbum()` to get random pictures, and I assume the pictures should be published to be selected by this function.

Instead of using `getRandomImagesAlbum()` to get several random images from an album, I recommend ot use the random images function of the image_album_statisics plugin as it gets a bunch of images in one go instead of one by one as the above. It is also not affected by this issue at all.

The function set of `printRandomImages()`, `getRandomImagesAlbum()` and `getRandomImages()` will get deprecated in the future (the latter two functions are even badly named as they do not get "images" but one "image"). We will keep the "picture of the day" option in a new separate function.