django-metaimage 0.4

Usage

The main class, MetaImage, enables storing useful metadata about images, including a title, caption, notes about the source (e.g. copyrights, permissions), and tags. MetaImage attributes include:

• title, slug, caption, source_note (for attribution text, copyrights, etc.)

• source_url (if any)

• privacy

• safetylevel

• tags

Now, to handle the two cases of storing images that the app was made for: retrieval of a remote image from its URL (you’ll have a local copy in case the image moves/disappears), or storing a server-side generated image:

• With a remote image, simply specify the source_url field in the new MetaImage instance and save it, e.g.

new_metaimage = MetaImage(
    title='Django logo',
    source_url='http://media.djangoproject.com/img/site/hdr_logo.gif',
    source_note='The logo of the Django project.',
    creator=foo_user)
new_metaimage.save()  # Will download, save source_url locally.

• With a server-side generated image - as a string object - one would send in the keyword argument image_data when saving, e.g.

new_metaimage = MetaImage(
    title='Chart of f(x)',
    source_note='Chart of f(x) generated by Matplotlib.',
    creator=foo_user)
new_metaimage.save(image_data=a_png_as_str)

Useful MetaImage methods include:

• render() and render_linked(), which spits out the HTML to show your image on a webpage, with a hyperlink to a details-page.

Basic views, tests, and templates are also provided, so you can quickly integrate the app into an existing Django site.

Installation

Install via “pip install django-metaimage” or from source. You may also need to do pip install for django-taggit, django-autoslug, and photologue.

Then update your Django project’s settings.py file: add “photologue”, “taggit” and “metaimage” (autoslug does not need to be there) in the INSTALLED_APPS list, e.g.

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
    "photologue",
    "taggit",
    "metaimage",
    ...
    ]

And then, do a “manage.py syncdb” to create the database tables needed.

OPTIONAL: Templates are provided for adding, editing, viewing, etc. of metaimages; they’re very basic and meant only as a starting point. But if you want to use them directly, do at least these two things:

1. Get and install django-uni-form > 0.7.0 which some of the templates rely on, and also update your setting.py INSTALLED_APPS to list “uni_form” as a package dependency.

2. Update your site-wide urls.py, e.g.

urlpatterns = patterns("",
    ...
    (r"^metaimage/", include("metaimage.urls")),
    ...
    )

Also, many of the django-metaimage templates have templatetags dependencies that are commented out, as they require Pinax or other packages; you can activate them as needed, but be sure to update your INSTALLED_APPS accordingly.

Testing

I’ve included a set of unit tests for the app; if you have integrated django-metaimage into an existing Django site/project, just do the usual “manage.py test” and the tests should be run, BUT for all tests to pass, the current trunk (as of 2/2011) of django-uni-form is needed:

https://github.com/pydanny/django-uni-form

Should you want to run django-metaimage’s test suite outside of any particular Django site/project - i.e. stand-alone Django app testing - I suggest installing and using the django-app-test-runner and my fork of it at:

https://github.com/limist/django-app-test-runner

…which enables usage of a testing-specific settings file. After you install django-app-test-runner in your virtualenv (don’t develop in Python without it!) you should be able to do something like:

cd to/where/django-metaimage/code/is
app-test-runner ./src/metaimage/ -s src/metaimage/testsettings.py

Note that you’ll need Internet connectivity for the tests to pass.

Errors, etc.

Please log errors/issues using django-metaimage’s github site, http://github.com/limist/django-metaimage/issues