django-ultimatethumb 0.5.0

What is django-ultimatethumb

django-ultimatethumb is another Django library for generating thumbnails but has some advantages:

• Thumbnails are not generated when the templatetag is called. Instead, images are generated on demand when they are requested by the browser. This can lead to a major speedup of your page response times.

• Thumbnails can be generated from static files too (for example to downscale retina-optimized images and therefore reducing traffic).

• Generate multiple thumbnail sizes at once for use in picture html tags with multiple sources (e.g. with media queries).

Quick start

To install django-ultimatethumb just use your preferred Python package installer:

$ pip install django-ultimatethumb

Add some stuff to your Django settings

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    # some other apps
    'ultimatethumb',
)

# This is the path where the generated thumbnail files are cached.
ULTIMATETHUMB_ROOT = '/filesystem/path/to/thumbnails/'
# This is the base url for your thumbnails
ULTIMATETHUMB_URL = '/thumbnails/'

Next, add the django-ultimatethumb urls to your urls.py

urlpatterns += patterns(
    '',
    url(
        r'^{0}/'.format(settings.ULTIMATETHUMB_URL.strip('/')),
        include('ultimatethumb.urls')
    ),

To use django-ultimatethumb in your templates, just load the templatetags and call the ultimatethumb tag with proper parameters:

{% load ultimatethumb_tags %}
{% ultimatethumb 'mythumb' mymodel.imagefield.name sizes='400x0,200x0' %}
<picture>
{% for source in mythumb %}
    <source
        srcset="{{ source.url_2x }} 2x, {{ source.url }} 1x"
        {% if not forloop.last %}media="(max-width: {{ source.size.width }}px)"{% endif %}
    />
    {% if forloop.last %}<img src="{{ source.url }}" />{% endif %}
{% endfor %}
</picture>

This gives you a full-featured picture tag including multiple sources with media queries for different browser sizes and also provides retina images.

You can also use django-ultimatethumb in a much simpler way:

{% load ultimatethumb_tags %}
{% ultimatethumb 'mythumb' mymodel.imagefield.name sizes='400x0' %}
<img src="{{ mythumb.0.url }}" />

To resize static images, just prefix the path with static:, for example:

{% load ultimatethumb_tags %}
{% ultimatethumb 'mythumb' 'static:img/logo.jpg' sizes='400x0' %}
<img src="{{ mythumb.0.url }}" />

There are many other options/parameters to pass to the templatetag. Please refer to the codebase until the documentation is more complete.