Allow views to display multiple images per node/entity

Hi bazzly. You are correct, the views plugin for this module was initially intended to support just one image per node, as that was what I assumed would be the most common use case. However, you are not the first person who has expressed interest in supporting multiple images per node via a view, and therefore achieving something of a "hybrid" application between the field formatter and the views plugin features of the module.

I may explore adding native support for this directly withing the module, but in the meantime you can still achieve this result by finessing the views field settings a bit. Thankfully views allows you to treat each image within an image field as a totally separate view entry, but this is not the default behavior. To do this simply open up the image field within your view (the one that contains your actual images) and look for a fieldset called "multiple field settings". Open this fieldset and then uncheck the option entitled "Display all values in the same row". This should force views to render all images from an image field in a way that's currently compatible with this Juicebox module.

Let me know if that works for you.

I'd also be interested to hear more about the specific use cases for this kind of setup. This would help me better understand if the module itself should/could natively support this kind of thing. What I don't fully understand is why you would want to setup a view display if you are already uploading multiple images into one node's image field. In your case would it not make more sense to use the Juicebox field formatter on the node itself, and leave views out of the equation?

Are you are trying to somewhat "cluster" min-galleries (multiple images per-node) into a single "super" gallery.

Hi Bazzly,

Your understanding of the views support being something of an "aggregator" is not too far off. Basically the idea is that you can use nearly any sorting and filtering mechanism available to views (and there are many) to structure your gallery. You could use Drupal's taxonomy (or other various field-based "tags") to categorize your images and then use a views filter to create multiple galleries that dynamically populate themselves based on how you tag each image over time (i.e. have a different gallery for each term/tag). If you use view's contextual filters you can even define an infinite number of tag-based galleries with a single view definition. The possibilities become quite vast thanks to the core power of views.

Anyway, at the moment this only really works in a consistent way if each node that you are sorting/filtering/displaying contains just one image along with one title, one caption, etc. If you define multiple images per node you can use the field formatter (no views) to easily turn that single node into a gallery, but this recipe does not necessarily translate into something that's friendly to a views display... at least not from my current perspective. For example, there is no way to apply different taxonomy terms to different images that are defined within one image field. This is because taxonomy terms are typically attached to the node/entity that contains the image field, and not the individual images within the image field. You could add a bunch of images to a single node (and use the "multiple field settings" trick to get them to all display via a view with Juicebox), but they would all then have to share whatever taxonomy terms are applied to that node along with other descriptive data that's treated as node-specific by views, such as the title, caption, etc. So with this arrangement you would loose the ability to control, and manipulate via views, your gallery on an image-by-image basis.

I hope that makes sense and summarizes my thinking going into the initial module design. I'd be open to tweaking things to better support multiple images per node/entity (via views), but I'd just need to better understand what the cases and advantages would be for that.

Oh, and in terms of your second question, let's open-up a separate issue for that as it looks like it relates to a small bug:

See: #1958248: Allow html tags in image title

Sounds good. So I'm assuming that means that you'll be able to satisfy your current use cases with the existing functionality available in this module and views?

Either way, I think I'll leave this issue up for a while. I suppose there may be others down the road who will have comments on the topic or will want to make an argument for a use case that requires better support of multiple images per node (via the views plugin). If that happens it'll be easier to keep all the info here in one place. So I'll just mark this as "postponed" and if anyone wants to continue this discussion please feel free to provide additional comments and toggle the status back to "active".

There have not been any additional comment on this for many months, so I think I'll go ahead and close it on account of inactivity. Hopefully some of the notes about will be a useful reference.