Letting a view know in which pane it's being displayed I've got a very non-trivial question on integrating Panels and Views. Maybe there's no solution out of the box, but I would really appreciate any help.

Essentially, I've got a lot of tagged nodes. For simplicity, let's say image nodes that are tagged as "flowers", or "animals", or "mountains", etc.

Then I have a view block that displays the images depending on their tag. This view block is then used in panel panes across the website.

Here's the issue: I can't use the URL to pass the tag information. In fact, on the same web page, I need to show several blocks (within panel panes) with different sets of images. One block would show "animals", another one "flowers", etc. And that depends only on the panel pane in which the view block is being displayed.

Of course, I could just create several preset view blocks, one only for "animals", another one for "flowers" etc, but I've got tens of different tags and can't create a separate block for each tag. So I was thinking of a more elegant solution.

Here's what my idea is: when I add content to a panel pane, I've got an option to override the title. I was thinking of adding another text field there "Tags to display" where I would say "flowers", or "animals", etc. Then I would just add the view block to the pane and that view block would pull that tag from the panel pane.

So, bottom line: how can I let the view know in which panel pane it's being displayed? Just pane ID would be enough, the rest (the tag to use) I could simply pull directly from the database.

Thanks for your ideas.
Build your views as "view content pane" displays.  That way any context you require for use in contextual filters can be provided in the panel UI when you set up the pane.