Random thumbnails Wordpress

Question

I'm trying to load 4 random thumbnails at the end of each post on Wordpress and each thumbnail should link to its respective post. I can't figure out how to do it properly, since I have very little knowledge of PHP. I have found this code snippet in the theme that get the thumbnail and the title:

<div class="col-sm-4 col-md-4 col-lg-4 tiles" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>" <?php post_class( 'post' ); ?> itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/BlogPosting">

    <?php
    if ( has_post_thumbnail() ) {
       echo '<div class="post-thumbnail">';
       echo '<a href="' . esc_url( get_permalink() ) . '">';
       echo get_the_post_thumbnail( $post->ID, 'shop_isle_blog_image_size' );
       echo '</a>';
       echo '</div>';
       }
     ?>
     <div class="tile_title">
        <a class="post-title"><a href="<?php echo esc_url( get_permalink() ); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></a>
     </div>
 </div>

Furthermore, the thumbnails should come from the same category as the current post. E.g. if someone is reading a blogpost from the "Travel" category the 4 thumbnails should only come from this category, and the same goes for the rest of the categories. Is it possible to do this?

Answer 1

This is called "related posts" feature. There are many plugins for this, for example YARPP is one such plugin.

If you want to avoid plugin, you can get theme that has this functionallity in the template itself. My blog for example uses Ribbon theme and contains this code.