I've had the hardest time figuring this out so I am making this post to explain as clearly as i can, what worked for me, to help someone else.
Let's say you have a project called project_name. and an app called app_name. your root directory should look like this:
/app_name
/project_name
manage.py
DEVELOPMENT.
while in development mode, your CSS and JS files should be inside ./app_name/static/app_name/..
however your images should be inside ./app_name/static/media/..
now add these to settings.py :
If this not already there, add
STATIC_URL = '/static/'
This tells Django where to find all the static files.
MEDIA_URL = '/media/'
This points Django to the folder where your images are, after it loads static. In this case it is /media/ because our images are in /static/media.
next, you should put this in the individual template where you need the image (I thought putting a single {% load static %} in the general layout.html template would suffice, it didn't):
{% load static %}
<img src="{% static image_name %}>
depending on how you set up your project, image_name could be the exact name of the image file like "image.jpg", a variable for an image field like user.image etc
lastly, go into the project_name urls.py (same folder as settings.py) and add this line to the end:
from django.conf import settings
from django.conf.urls.static import static
if settings.DEBUG:
urlpatterns += static(settings.MEDIA_URL, document_root=settings.MEDIA_ROOT)
basically telling Django to use a work around so you can see use the images in development.
That is all. your project will now display images while you are writing and testing your code(development)
PRODUCTION.
When you want to deploy your project, there are some extra steps you need to take.
Because Django does not serve images as static files during production, you have to install a Middleware called Whitenoise.
http://whitenoise.evans.io/en/stable/#installation
pip install whitenoise
Then add the following to settings.py:
look for MIDDLEWARE and add just under django.middleware.security.SecrutiyMiddleware:
'whitenoise.middleware.WhiteNoiseMiddleware',
Next we have to define our paths, this is because in production Django will basically collect all the static files from all our apps and rearrange them in a single folder.
Add the following to settings.py:
STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'static')
This tells Django where to put static files when it collects them. In this case we are telling Django to put the files in the root folder. so after collectstatic runs our app would look like
/app_name
/project_name
/static
manage.py
Then add:
MEDIA_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'media')
This tells django where to put files that a user who on our site uploads..
Next,we want to go up and change Debug to False.
Debug = False
Debug mode is used for testing in development, and in production you don't want your app displaying error codes and the names of files and lines where something went wrong. potential security threat. Once you turn debug mode to false, Django changes how it serves the static files. so ordinarily, if you were to run your app now, you won't see the images..
with these done, now you are ready for production. to test that everything is okay, you can run:
python manage.py collectstatic
(type yes if prompted)
Django will collect all the static files and arrange them as necessary. if you run your project now, with debug still turned off you should see your images. you can even now delete the individual static folders in app_name or any other apps you have, if you want because Django will not use them in production. Once debug is off, Django only uses static from the collected static folder.
You can now deploy your project
