Adding jitter to ggimage geom_image() plots when they overlap

Question

Let's take this example of displaying images instead of points on a ggplot.

set.seed(2017-02-21)
d <- data.frame(x = rnorm(10),
                y = rnorm(10),
                image = sample(c("https://www.r-project.org/logo/Rlogo.png",
                                 "https://jeroenooms.github.io/images/frink.png"),
                               size=10, replace = TRUE)
)
# plot2
ggplot(d, aes(x, y)) + geom_image(aes(image=image), size=.08)

I need to modify the code so that it adds some distance/jitter once the images overlap (or are closer to each other based on x,y). Is that possible without too complicated workarounds?

Answer 1

Try position = position_jitter():

(You can set a seed in position_jitter for reproducibility if needed.)

library(ggplot)
library(ggimage)

set.seed(2)
d <- data.frame(
  x = rnorm(10),
  y = rnorm(10),
  image = sample(
    c(
      "https://www.r-project.org/logo/Rlogo.png",
      "https://jeroenooms.github.io/images/frink.png"
    ),
    size = 10,
    replace = TRUE
  )
)

ggplot(d, aes(x, y)) +
  geom_image(aes(image = image), size = .08, position = position_jitter(width = 0.2))