Jesus I hate shopify development, it's so hacky you can't do anything the clean way :(

I am trying have my product pages swap out all the images based on selected variant, so I have a whole new set of images per variant.

Lets add a variant_id metafield to each product image, then we just iterate over the images add a data-variant-id attribute to each image we can do stuff with.

NOPE, you can only access the alt metafield for images in liquid. The language doesn't support accessing any other metafields because... ?

So one option is to use the image alt tag for my code, which i'm not doing because that's stupid.

Or what I am trying to do now is storing the image urls on the actual variant under a metafield namespace 'variant-images'. Except now I can't use the built in image filter, so I have to hack in the image filters...