azureabstraction > out of the blue

Cycling through Photos

I've been puzzling over how best to display photos from Flickr. On my home page, I show my most recent six photos, which helps keep things fresh for search engines and visitors. The problem is that I generally only upload a photoset every month or two, so the same six photos remain up for a couple months, before switching out for a new set of six photos. Furthermore, those final six photos are probably related to each other, so they won't generally represent the variety contained in the photostream. Here are the possibilities I'm considering:

  1. Display the last six photos. This is my current strategy, and has the disadvantages outlined above. Its main advantage is that it is simple, and requires no history.
  2. Display a random six photos from the last X photos. This has the advantage that it will keep changing, and will have a much greater chance of displaying all of the recent photos from time to time, especially if X is large. It is also quite simple. But the chaotic nature of randomness puts me off a little — a visitor can't know what to expect.
  3. Progressively work through new photos. Each is displayed for a period of time. This spreads the freshness out over a longer period of time, but it is quite complicated. It involves keeping track of all photos posted, and having some algorithm to decide when to move on.
  4. Hand-pick favorite photos from each photoset. This has the advantage of displaying a wider variety of photos, of higher quality, but has the disadvantage of not giving them each a chance. It also means I have to write infrastructure to keep track of favorites, or tie into Flickr's favorite mechanism.

Any thoughts?

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