I thought about that for a while and I MIGHT have an idea to get this working, but this is a workaround. An working 4images-setup is running at
http://galerie.cvjmbonn.deThe idea is to use a switch, which turns the display of the thumbs in an category off, imagine you have the following setup
1. Cars
1.1 old cars
1.2 new cars
Cars has no pictures but you want to have a random thumb from old and new next to cars catogy info.
1. step: you DO include a set of pictures in cars, from which these thumbs are generated
2. step: you switch the thumbs-display in cars OFF (which leaves you with an empty category again)
The first step is quite simple, you upload images as links to the real images, choose the thumbnail in both, img and thumbnail, no space used for that.
Second step needs adjustment of template categories.html, you put the following "brace" around the stuff that should be ignored if the switch is set
<?php $pos = strpos ("{cat_description}", "class='hc'"); if ($pos === false) { ?>
{paging_stats}
...
{if thumbnails}
...
{endif thumbnails}
...
{paging}
...
{category_dropdown_form}</td>
...
<?php } ?>
YOU descide by this, which parts should be ignored, i skip stats, thumbs, paging and the dropdown list
Now you have to activate the switch, just add <span class='hc'></span> to the description of the category you want to clear, and you are done (hopefully you do not have an hc-css-class, if so, you have to choose another name for the switch)
Yours
John