Yup, you're right.
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I have thought of this, but haven't quite figured out the logic. Maybe writing this will clear my head.
All the sites have been categorized by sex (m/f), rating (g/pg/r), size of images, number of images, niche (vintage, region...asia / italy / etc, current celebs, genre, etc).
To really make the script work, I'd need to have preferences to reflect the interests of the person, as well as some information from other sources...ie from imdb (actor/actress) so I'd need access to the URL in the database via the script, and preferrably (don't want rewrite the 'get a person' code from the IMDB plugin) their place of birth and birthday. I can then assign priorities to the various sites based on that information and search them in order. There would have to be an override on this to reflect 'no nudity', min / max images sizes.
Personal preferences could indeed be hardcoded into the script. For specific images of oriental or vintage film cast members, I'd still want to hit specific sites first, which would be a runtime setting.
Assuming that is resolved, or just ignored, I start processing.
I go to a site and find some images. The site has several pages of images, so iterate through pages, adding hits to the list of links that need to be followed. If I 'early out' the routine, any site that has images later in the list won't ever be processed. If I don't, I have to iterate through every site using bandwidth / time.
So I assume, let's go through them all and sort it out later.
If I only have one link, and it's from a site that needs to be validated manually, I can't reasonably allow an update without manual intervention.
So that site can't be included in the script.
I now have a list of 20 links that lead to image pages. If I use the first link as default, I should have done an 'early out'. If I don't I have to assume the person is sitting there making the selection.
I assume the person is not there.
Do I choose a link by the number of images on the page, or do I have the order set such that the most reliable site comes first?
I assume reliability, so after a hit on a reliable site, I can 'early out'...none of the others would be selected anyway.
This all sounds doable, and would suit my uses perfectly. For everyone else, there's a lot of guesswork involved which makes the whole thing inefficient. If I brute-force it, the result could be brutal...hit 50+ sites and find nothing.
Re-reading your post, it occurs to me that I could list one image from each site (or a text link if not available on the listing page), with a link to the image page(s). Click on the image, get a list of images from that site. I'm not sure how easy it will be to select the routine that selects what parsing procedure to call for each link. I suppose I could put a tag in the listing title.
Now it's starting to make better sense to me.
I have one script done, minus sanity checks so I'll use that as a base and see what problems come up.
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