How can PHP developers prevent duplicate counting or starting from zero when displaying images on different gallery pages?

To prevent duplicate counting or starting from zero when displaying images on different gallery pages, PHP developers can use sessions to store and retrieve the count of displayed images. By storing the count in a session variable, it can persist across different pages and prevent resetting to zero or counting duplicates.

// Start the session
session_start();

// Check if the session variable for image count exists
if (!isset($_SESSION['image_count'])) {
    // If it doesn't exist, initialize it to 0
    $_SESSION['image_count'] = 0;
}

// Increment the image count
$_SESSION['image_count']++;

// Display the image count
echo "Total images displayed: " . $_SESSION['image_count'];