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sorl-thumbnail on PyPI Supported Python versions Supported Django versions Documentation for latest version gh-actions Coverage pre-commit.ci status

Thumbnails for Django.

Features at a glance

  • Support for Django 5.2, 6.0, and 6.1 following the Django supported versions policy

  • Storage support

  • Pluggable Engine support for Pillow, ImageMagick, PIL, Wand, pgmagick, and vipsthumbnail

  • Pluggable Key Value Store support (cached db, redis, and dynamodb by AWS)

  • Pluggable Backend support

  • Admin integration with possibility to delete

  • Dummy generation (placeholders)

  • Flexible, simple syntax, generates no html

  • CSS style cropping options

  • Back smart cropping, and remove borders from the images when cropping

  • Margin calculation for vertical positioning

  • Alternative resolutions versions of a thumbnail

Read more in the documentation (latest version)

Developers

By contributing you agree to abide by the Code of Conduct. To report a security issue, follow the security policy instead of opening a public issue.

Feel free to create a new Pull request if you want to propose a new feature. If you need development support or want to discuss with other developers join us in GitHub Discussions.

Tests

The tests run with tox, which uses uv to create its environments. With uv installed, uvx –with tox-uv tox will run all tests for all environments. However, it is possible to run a certain environment with uvx –with tox-uv tox -e <env>, a list of all environments can be found with uvx –with tox-uv tox -l. These tests require the dependencies of the different engines defined in the documentation. The easiest way to run tests is using Docker - see the contributing documentation for detailed instructions on running tests locally with Docker.

User Support

If you need help using sorl-thumbnail ask in the Q&A category of GitHub Discussions.

How to Use

Get the code

Getting the code for the latest stable release use ‘pip’.

$ pip install sorl-thumbnail

Install in your project

Then register ‘sorl.thumbnail’, in the ‘INSTALLED_APPS’ section of your project’s settings.

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.messages',
    'django.contrib.staticfiles',

    'sorl.thumbnail',
]

Templates Usage

All of the examples assume that you first load the thumbnail template tag in your template.:

{% load thumbnail %}

A simple usage.

{% thumbnail item.image "100x100" crop="center" as im %}
    <img src="{{ im.url }}" width="{{ im.width }}" height="{{ im.height }}">
{% endthumbnail %}

See more examples in the section Template examples in the Documentation

Model Usage

You can use sorl.thumbnail.ImageField in your models:

from django.db import models
from sorl.thumbnail import ImageField

class Item(models.Model):
    image = ImageField(upload_to='whatever')

See more examples in the section Model examples in the Documentation

Low level API

You can use the ‘get_thumbnail’:

from sorl.thumbnail import get_thumbnail
from sorl.thumbnail import delete

im = get_thumbnail(my_file, '100x100', crop='center', quality=99)
delete(my_file)

See more examples in the section Low level API examples in the Documentation

Using in combination with other thumbnailers

Alternatively, you load the templatetags by {% load sorl_thumbnail %} instead of traditional {% load thumbnail %}. It’s especially useful in projects that do make use of multiple thumbnailer libraries that use the same name (thumbnail) for the templatetag module:

{% load sorl_thumbnail %}
{% thumbnail item.image "100x100" crop="center" as im %}
    <img src="{{ im.url }}" width="{{ im.width }}" height="{{ im.height }}">
{% endthumbnail %}

Frequently asked questions

Is it slow on Amazon S3?

Once a thumbnail is in the key-value store, rendering it makes no request to the storage at all. A slow page means thumbnails are being generated, or the key-value store was cleared or lost. Generating a thumbnail reads the source once and writes the result once, which is as little as it can be.

Older versions of this FAQ recommended THUMBNAIL_FORCE_OVERWRITE = True. That advice dates from boto 2. With boto3 it makes things worse: on a key-value store miss it regenerates the thumbnail from the full-size source instead of making one HEAD request for the file that is already there. See THUMBNAIL_FORCE_OVERWRITE before enabling it.

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