title: Laravel belongsTo only returns the id and not the entire object
body: <p>I was under the impression that when I use a belongsTo relationship in my model, it will return the object but I seem to only get the id. Is this supposed to happen and what is the benefit of this?</p>
  
  <p>This is my code: </p>
  
  <p>From my Photo model</p>
  
  <pre><code>public function album()
  {
      return $this-&gt;belongsTo('Album', 'album');
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And my PhotosController</p>
  
  <pre><code>$photo = Photo::find($id);
  $album = $photo-&gt;album;
  return 'albums/' . $album-&gt;folder . '/thumbs/' . $photo-&gt;file;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Don't mind the return, it's just for testing. I get an error:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Trying to get property of non-object
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And a <code>var_dump()</code> shows that all I get is a string with the album's id</p>