Why I Love django-photologue
When I first started working with Django, I didn't know about photologue. Whenever I needed an image for a particular model, I would use the standard django ImageField(). I would search on the internet for snippets and techniques on creating thumbnails for the images when they are saved. This became a bit tedious, and after searching for a while longer, I discovered a wonderful little app, which I still use from time to time, called sorl.
The next project I woked on required a gallery, I thought I'd take advantage of django pluggable apps, and started searching for a nice django gallery solution, and stumbled upon django-photologue. I just integrated the app as is, and didn't really bother looking into it much deeper. It did what I wanted, and I was happy. So a year later, I found myself having to do a project, where the client wanted to upload a image, and automatically have a couple of different sizes created for the site. At first I was thinking of using sorl for this, but I had this nagging voice in my head, telling me to look at how django-photologue creates the different image sizes based on it's photo sizes model.
So for the first time, I actually started reading throught the photologue documentation, and browsing through the code a bit. It was inevitable. I discovered the photologue ImageModel, and since then I have not looked back. Together with the methods such as get_SIZE_url(), the ImageModel saves huge amounts of time from any project that needs to create various image sizes from uploads etc.
All you have to do is to make sure that you create the correct image sizes in your photo sizes model, and then use those sizes at the correct places in your templates. And no, you dont have to use the rest of photologue, if all you want is the photo sizes. I typically set up the photo sizes and other photologue settings. and then hide the model for the general content editors of the site. They have the image model where they can upload images, and it works great as is. They also dont have to bother about uploading different sizes for the images.
I'm using photologue on this website to generate 3 different images sizes for the blog, a large, medium and small size, along with a thumbnail. The Project thumnails and display sizes are also created by photologue. If you haven't tried photologue before, you should really give it a go.
Django-photologue is on google code if you are interested in checking it out.
Andre - on 27 Feb 2010
That's great news! I will definitely have a look and use it in my next project :)
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Justin Driscoll - on 27 Feb 2010
Thanks for the generous review. I'm glad you've found Photologue useful. If you like what you can do with it's ImageModel class, you might want to take a look at my newer library django-imagekit (http://hg.driscolldev.com/django-imagekit/). ImageKit focusing entirely on the ImageModel functionality (no pre-built gallery), is lighter weight than Photologue and supports custom plugins.