Retrieving the complete assets for an Entry

[321zeno]

Apologies if this has been answered before, I couldn't find an answer here or in the docs.

I'm using the Eloquent driver, and Blade views.

I've got an entry that contains some assets for an image gallery.

I'm retrieving it by slug in a Laravel controller

$entry = Entry::query()
  ->where('collection', 'items')
  ->where('slug', $slug)
  ->firstOrFail()

When I dd($entry->image_gallery) I get

array:4 [▼ // app/Http/Controllers/ItemsController.php:42
  0 => "image2.jpg"
  1 => "image2.jpg"
  2 => "image1.jpg"
  3 => "image1.jpg"
]

How can I retrieve the "full" asset fields, with objects that have the permalink, alt attributes, etc?

[321zeno]

Just realised that the EntryModel returned by firstOrFail() does not have the Augmentable methods.
If I change it to first()

$entry = Entry::query()
  ->where('collection', 'items')
  ->where('slug', $slug)
  ->first()

Then I am able to call
dd($item->toEvaluatedAugmentedArray('image_gallery')) which gives me the whole asset as an array but it would be good to know if this is the best practice

[jasonvarga]

$entry->image_gallery should be giving you a collection of asset instances.

If you're only seeing an array of filenames, maybe you got rid of or renamed the blueprint field? The data would remain, but since there's no corresponding blueprint field it wouldn't know to convert the filenames to assets.