ipython notebook - uploading from and saving to subdirectories?

Question

Change IPython working directory Inserting image into IPython notebook markdown

Hi, I've read the two above links, and the second link seems most relevant. what the person describes - simply calling the subdirectory - doesn't work for me. For instance, I have an image 'gephi.png' in '/Graphs/gephi.png' But when I write the following

from IPython.display import Image
path = "/Graphs/gephi.png"
i = Image(path)
i

no image pops up - Yup. No error. Just nothing pops up besides an empty square box image.

Clarification: When I move the image to the regular director, the image pops up fine. My only code change is path = "gephi.png"

Have you executed the line? If there is an error, you should see an error message... — Has QUIT--Anony-Mousse, Feb 28 '14 at 18:04
Yup. No error. Just nothing pops up besides an empty square box image. — user3314418, Feb 28 '14 at 18:05
Maybe that are the contents of the image? Anyway, why didn't you include this in the question? We didn't see this pop up, you know... — Has QUIT--Anony-Mousse, Feb 28 '14 at 18:06
Note that also ipython may automatically scale down the image for display. So if this is a huge graph, the scaling may end up keeping all the white inbetween of your nodes only. — Has QUIT--Anony-Mousse, Feb 28 '14 at 18:16
Looking at the path to image in description & code, aren't you missing a "/" before Graphs in the code? — Amit, Feb 28 '14 at 18:27
@Amit, sorry that was a typo - i did have the forward slash in the original code, but it still doesn't work. — user3314418, Feb 28 '14 at 19:09
@anony-Mousse It works if you just have the path in the main file folder. the image comes up in the notebook. — user3314418, Feb 28 '14 at 19:09
Are you sure the path is fully correct, and your OSX isn't playing tricks on you, by presenting you fake paths in finder or something like this? In a terminal, does `ls -l /Graphs/gephi.png` work? — Has QUIT--Anony-Mousse, Feb 28 '14 at 22:42

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 01 '14 at 00:05

IPython's Image display object takes three kinds of arguments

The first is raw image data (e.g. the results of open(filename).read():

with open("Graphs/graph.png") as f:
    data = f.read()
Image(data=data)

The second model is to load an image from a filename. This is functionally the same as above, but IPython does the reading from the file:

Image(filename="Graphs/graph.png")

The third form is passing URLs. External URLs can be used, but relative URIs will serve files relative to the notebook's own directory:

Image(url="Graphs/graph.png")

Where this can get confusing is if you don't tell IPython which one of these you are specifying, and you just pass the one argument positionally:

Image("Graphs/graph.png")

IPython tries to guess what you mean in this case:

if it looks like a path and points to an existing file, use it as a filename
if it looks like a URL, use it as a URL
otherwise, fallback on embedding the string as raw png data

That #3 is the source of the most confusion. If you pass it a filename that doesn't exist, you will get a broken image:

Image("/Graphs/graph.png")

Note that URLs to local files must be relative. Absolute URLs will generally be wrong:

Image(url="/Graphs/graph.png")

An example notebook illustrating these things.

Thanks for this. The Raw image data option works! Conversely, if I wanted to save to a subdirectory, is there a similar way to do that? — user3314418, Mar 03 '14 at 14:09
It is in a subdirectory in all of these cases - `Graphs` is a directory adjacent to the notebook file. If you want it more deeply nested, just use `any/other/subdir/graph.png` — minrk, Mar 04 '14 at 17:12

ipython notebook - uploading from and saving to subdirectories?

1 Answers1