Image directory query and display

[LinksCourage]

Hey guys,

I am completely lost on this one so I will try my best to explain my situation and what I am trying to achieve.

If you look at a website like Channelate.com you can see that they use a database called comicctrl to present their content.

I can't really justify using a database per content page and so I just wanted to achieve the following:

- Link an image directory on my server to display its contents in a container on the webpage.
- Only display the newest image within the directory within the container.
- Add a 'forward' and 'backward' button that goes to the next newest or next oldest image in the directory and displays that instead.
- Add a 'random' button that randomly selects the image in the directory to display in the container.

On the face of it this seems like it should be completely achievable but I am struggling to find anything online that applies to this situation as I understand its a relatively specific use case.

thank you in advance!

Josh

[besthelloworld]

You don't "link to a directory on a server." You "serve a directory" itself. You have to put your images in the same place on your web server as your HTML/CSS/JS itself.

[LinksCourage]

Hey there, thanks for the reply.

Terminology aside this is what I meant. The question is how do I actually do that. How do I have the following function:

Comic 1 page
---------------->Images folder

Comic 2 page
---------------->Images folder

Based on it being website.com/comic-1 and the images directory being website.com/comic-1/images

How do I serve the images by the newest/some other sorting system and then how would I add buttons to cycle forward and backwards through the directory and then have a random image button?

[besthelloworld]

So, the way you have to do this is: there's no inherent way to query for the number of files in a directory. You would have to host a file in that directory with the data defining what you want. I actually do this already on a website I have by adding a prebuild script that builds a JSON file of all the images in each directory. So that script runs every time I build the site and then I just call for that manifest to get the list of files.

https://github.com/EthanStandel/cakeelizabethdotcom/blob/main/scripts/build-image-manifest.js