COUNT in LEFT JOIN returning duplicated value - php

Question

I've the following tables (example):
users:
id | user | photo | joined | country
1 | Igor | abc.jpg | 2015 | Brazil
2 | John | cga.png | 2014 | USA
3 | Lucas| hes.jpg | 2016 | Japan
posts (see that there are two lines with author = Igor and ft = 2 and one line with author = Igor and ft = 3 and Igor have three posts):
id | author | content | date | ft (2 = photos and 3 = videos)
1 | Igor | hi | 2016 | 2
2 | Igor | hello | 2016 | 3
3 | John | hehehe | 2016 | 2
4 | Igor | huhuhuh | 2016 | 2
5 | Lucas | lol | 2016 | 3
friendship (when status = 2 means that they are friends):
id | friend1 | friend2 | status
1 | Igor | Lucas | 2
2 | Lucas | John | 2
3 | John | Igor | 2
And I want to do a COUNT of posts with ft = 2 and a COUNT of friends (status = 2) according to the currently logged user (Igor, in this case).
So, I do (assuming that the current user logged in is Igor):
SELECT photo, joined, country, sum(CASE WHEN ft = 2 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) AS numPhotos, sum(CASE WHEN ft = 3 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) AS numVideos
FROM users
LEFT JOIN posts
ON users.user = posts.author
WHERE users.user = 'Igor'
GROUP BY users.user
LIMIT 1
And when I check on a foreach, the data is correct:
numPhotos = 2 and numVideos = 1.
But, I want to select too the number of friends, so, I do:
SELECT photo, joined, country, sum(CASE WHEN ft = 2 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) AS numPhotos, sum(CASE WHEN ft = 3 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) AS numVideos, count(friendship.status) AS numFriends
FROM users
LEFT JOIN posts
ON users.user = posts.author
LEFT JOIN friendship
ON (users.user = friend1 OR users.user = friend2) AND friendship.status = 2
WHERE users.user = 'Igor'
GROUP BY users.user
LIMIT 1
But, the output is:
numPhotos = 4, numVideos = 2 and numFriends = 6.
In other words, he is duplicating all results but in numFriends he's taking the total of posts of Igor (3) and duplicating the value too. And if I change count(friendship.status) to sum(friendship.status) the output is:
numPhotos = 4, numVideos = 2 and numFriends = 18 (triples the numFriends).
I tried too with count(distinct friendship.status) and the result is:
numPhotos = 4, numVideos = 2 and numFriends = 1 (duplicates the values again as well as return the wrong value 1 for numFriends that should be 2 knowing he has two friends).
So, how I can do this? (I'm using MySQL)
EDIT:
I changed the count(distinct friendship.status) to count(distinct friendship.id) and it worked to select the number of friends. But the rest of values (numPhotos and numVideos) continue duplicated.
I discovered that the problem is in ON (users.user = friend1 OR users.user = friend2), because if I leave only ON (users.user = friend1) or ON (users.user = friend2) the output isn't duplicated. I tried too with ON 'Igor' IN (friend1, friend2) but the result is the same (numPhotosandnumVideos` continue duplicated).

Answer 1

I think the left join may be joining on a one-to-many relationship, which is causing inflated counts.
Since you are only retrieving the counts for 1 user, I suggest using a subquery to retrieve the friendship counts (for retrieving the counts for multiple users, a derived table may be faster than a subquery):
SELECT
sum(ft = 2) AS numPhotos,
sum(ft = 3) AS numVideos,
(select count(*) from friendships f
where (friend1 = users.user
or friend2 = users.user)
and status = 2) as friendship_count
FROM users
LEFT JOIN posts
ON users.user = posts.author
WHERE users.user = 'Igor'
Note that I removed the group by because users.user is already in the where clause, which means there is only 1 group.

Answer 2

Instead of count(distinct friendship.status), try using count(distinct friendship.id). That should give you the number of unique friends. Counting distinct statuses doesn't work because all the statuses will be 2 by definition, so there is only one distinct value.