How about a "Shuffle" option?

As I was searching my portfolio today, the thought occurred to me that something like a "shuffle" option may be helpful to photo buyers who are looking for the perfect image. What it would do is reorganize the search results every time they click on it giving them a new variety of images to look though. This would be particularly useful when the search results bring up thousands of images.

Just a thought...

(Edited on 2013-02-08 13:30:57 by sdominick)

It's an option that has been called for many times. The randomised search option has probably been suggested every other month, somewhere on the forums. I'm not sure why it's never been introduced.

I would shuffle if I could

I keep asking for a random or shuffle search. I'd like to hear any arguments against it since I can't think of any good reason not to have a random search. It would help buyers who are having difficulty finding the right image and will help sell the old and dead files.

It's a win/win situation.  Makes no sense why they would not have such an option.

Seems so logical. Which unfortunately doesn't mean it will ever happen. I'm sure buyers would use it often though!

I've seen this suggested so many times and it seems to be a good idea, my only guess is that the back end work required to generate a random sequence for every search would be a burden on the hardware serving it up. Sorting by a set value that a file has is one thing, but if someone searches a word such as Beautiful, that has close to 2.4 million matches, I'm not sure how the mechanics of randomising that many results would work.

One thing is though, I've not seen any buyers ever request this as a sort order, only contributors. It could also be a pain for buyers who see an image they like on one page, skip to another page but when they go back, would the random sorting mean the previous page had changed? Would buyers have to add everything to a LB as they went along before they navigated away from the page? I can see it could cause frustration.

(Edited on 2013-03-20 18:50:43 by kelvinjay)

thanks Kelvinjay for the information as to why a random search might not work. I do see other stock sites using a random search though so it may be possible. It is a good idea for contributors I think to stir the pot of files and give some dead files a chance at selling. When I was a buyer I used the random search a lot and yes, I did light box possible images choices as I searched.

I wonder if a shuffle option would affect buyers any more than the frequent "tweaks" which move images around. Having some sort of controlled shuffle, that is showing several different "tweaked" pages rather than a truly random mix would seem to be a good way of getting more content in front of buyers.


This is getting to be an awfully big shop, with a very narrow front window.


I know it all about serving the buyers here, and rightly so, but the fact that contributors are putting their work here to be seen and sold needs to be addressed as well.