django-metaimage 0.3

Wrapper around django-photologue dealing w/ remote images.

django-metaimage is an app for the Django web framework; it’s meant to be helpful when dealing with a lot of images from the Internet where the starting point is each image’s URL, as opposed to the more common case of manually uploaded images via a web interface (which django-metaimage can also handle). It is GPL-licensed.

The main MetaImage model provides a wrapper of useful functionality around ImageModel from django-photologue, a dependency. Some of the django-metaimage code was initially inspired from Pinax’s photo app, but I have removed Pinax dependencies, so that django-metaimage only requires:

1. Django

2. django-photologue

3. django-tagging

4. django-uni-form, trunk (optional)

You might need django-uni-form, if you want to use the included example templates, and want to see all django-metaimage’s tests pass.

Overall, this app is an alternate way to use the powerful django-photologue app with your site, and possibly with any of your code/process where there’s an influx of many externally-hosted images that need to be represented locally somehow.

Usage

Most websites need to deal with images, sometimes uploaded from users, or retrieved from a remote site. The django-metaimage package is especially helpful with the latter case: you can supply just the URL of a remote image, and it will be downloaded and saved locally.

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

• privacy

• safetylevel

• tags

And key MetaImage methods include:

• A save() method that can automatically download a remote image to your filesystem, so you’ll always have a local copy should the remote image vanish into the Internet aether.

• 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. Then just add “photologue”, “tagging” and “metaimage” to your Django project settings.py file, in the INSTALLED_APPS list, e.g.

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
    "photologue",
    "tagging",
    "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