[eluser]jedd[/eluser]
I'm confused - my first response is to point out that you need to be putting your $pict into an array, and passing that array to your view - but you've got 400+ posts .. so this seems like something you should already know, so maybe there's something more subtle about your question.
To answer your second question, no, I'd probably have a view partial that took the array proper, and did the loop in there - depends what kind of stuff it is, of course. I don't think view-loading is especially expensive, it just seems neater. Even more so if most of the places you're calling this view partial involves multiple items that you need to loop through. Easy enough to have a loop in your view that copes within single items as well as multiples.