Users will be able to upload 1 or as many images as they want using multiple image input.
Images table
Columns: id, name, description, user_id, file_name
The home will display the images but not display the accompanying images, they will be displayed on the specific image page. If the user uploads 1 image, there won't be accompanying images.
Home page would be something like this:
@foreach($images as $image)
<a href='{{url("image/".$image->id)}}'>
<img src='{{url("storage/uploads/images/thumbnails/".$image->file_name)}}' alt='Random image'/>
</a>
@endforeach
For simplicity, in the case of multiple images upload the first image in the array will be the main image that will be displayed on home.blade.php and will be saved in file_name column in images table.
On the specific image page, if the image does not have any accompanying images it should only have 1 image like this:
<img src='{{url("storage/uploads/images/specificImages/".$image->file_name)}}' alt='Random image' />
and if it has accompanying images it should display the main image and then the accompanying images.
Now my question is whether I should create a second table and model for the accompanying images or should I add a field in images table like collection that will contain an unique value that will be shared between images from same collection?
Now my question is whether I should create a second table and model for the accompanying images or
It should be perfectly sufficient to add new column to existing table named i.e. parent_id and set its value for all accompanying images to id of the image they accompany (1st one from your set). And for that parent image's record, you keep that field set i.e. to NULL to indicate this one has no parent.