how to check if grid field is empty

I have no idea whats the deal with total codes in your template and how you have built it, but have you tried this:

{artist_gallery}
 <div id="artistgallery">
  <div class="cycle-slideshow">
   
    {artist_gallery:image}
  
  </div>
  <div id="adv-custom-pager" ></div>
  <div class="clb"></div>
 </div>
 {/artist_gallery}

Havent tried but it should not show anything if there is no image available?

That’s the first thing I tried. If no image is present, nothing is present – but if there is more than one image, everything inside {artist_gallery} is rendered for every single image.

So you want to pull out less markup, and the conditional is working when there is images right?

What about this then, (if your code is working when images available):

{if "{artist_gallery:total_rows}" > 0}
 <div id="artistgallery">
  <div class="cycle-slideshow">
   {artist_gallery}
    {artist_gallery:image}
   {/artist_gallery}
  </div>
  <div id="adv-custom-pager" ></div>
  <div class="clb"></div>
 </div>
{if:else}
FOO and a BAR :blush:
{/if}

I have no idea again, does that produce some sort of conflict…

Seems the rows of the grid have nothing to do with the objects inside the rows. What ever condition I use, I get strange results – sometimes a second image is rendered outside the gallery container … I’ll try something else. Thank you for your help.

Yep, sometimes we all need to re-think how-to. Shout out with the results how you finally did it?