Comments on: Dynamic upload paths in Django

By: Jesse

Jesse — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 17:24:58 +0000

Thanks very much for this tutorial … it was a lifesaver for me. A small note to add to the comments:

- The upload_to callable technique also works just fine if you’re uploading an image as part of larger form. You can save a form as normal in your view code, and the request.FILES data will be passed along to your model w/o problems, like this:

    form = UploadForm(request.POST, request.FILES)
    if form.is_valid():
        form.save() # all FILES data get passed along, get_image_path callable works fine
        return HttpResponseRedirect('/some/url/')

Initially I got stuck on this point, because I was trying to save the form with form.save() AND save the image separately with the view code in your tutorial.

Again thanks. There are a lot of outdated file/image upload tutorials on the web that can be quite confusing for django newcomers. This is great.

By: Richard

Richard — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 22:13:08 +0000

Thanks for the great example.

By: Scott

Scott — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 09:56:36 +0000

Thanks, Fidel. I’ve updated the post to use os.path.join in the example.

By: Fidel Ramos

Fidel Ramos — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 09:20:02 +0000

Nice example, simple and to the point. However remember to use os.path.join instead of manually writing dir paths, or it wouldn't work in (at least) Windows.

import os
 
def get_image_path(instance, filename):
    return os.path.join('photos', instance.id, filename)

By: Scott

Scott — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 11:22:16 +0000

@Incinnerator.

The method gets called by Django, so you can’t add parameters to it. If you can work out the “number” from the instance, that’s best. Otherwise, I think you’ll need to get that number from the submitted form or from the view and set it separately on your model (Photo in my example).

By: Incinnerator

Incinnerator — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 21:02:39 +0000

Really helpful, great!

I have a question, is it possible to give the method a third argument?
something like below?

def get_image_path(instance, filename, number):
return ‘photos/%s/%s%s’ % (instance.id, filename, number)

and how would you use it in the model?

thx

By: Moorthy

Moorthy — Mon, 25 May 2009 10:18:06 +0000

Yes, very helpful. Thanks a bunch!

By: Tom

Tom — Wed, 20 May 2009 04:30:06 +0000

Needed this functionality, found your post, implemented it in 10 minutes. Super helpful, thanks!

By: bcline

bcline — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 08:25:17 +0000

For completeness, the above code uses…

from django.template.defaultfilters import slugify

By: bcline

bcline — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 18:51:26 +0000

For multiple models that modify the upload_to path you can use a single function to create the callable to pass to the upload_to parameter.

def upload_to(path, attribute):
    
    def upload_callback(instance, filename):
        return '%s%s/%s' % (path, unicode(slugify(getattr(instance, attribute))), filename)
    
    return upload_callback

...
#Model definitions
class Photo(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField()
    image = models.ImageField(upload_to = upload_to('uploads/', 'name'))

class Screenshot(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField()
    image = models.ImageField(upload_to = upload_to('uploads/', 'title'))