Question

I have a script.py located in a folder called subfolder1. This folder is inside a folder called mainfolder. There is another folder inside mainfolder called subfolder2. I would like for script.py to open an image inside subfolder2 and do some cropping etc, but I don’t know how to get the directory right. I have tried:

import os
rel = "../subfolder2/1.bmp"
impath = os.path.abspath(rel)
im = Image.open(impath)

But the error message appears:

IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'C:\\Users\\****\\Desktop\\mainfolder\\subfolder2\\1.bmp'

By the way, I am using Windows.

Answer 1

If your directory structure looks like this:

mainfolder/
    subfolder1/
        script.py
    subfolder2/
        1.bmp

… Then you can construct a path relative to the script.py. Right now you are only working with a path relative to the current working directly where you have launched your shell command.

You can do something like this:

import os
scriptDir = os.path.dirname(__file__)
impath = os.path.join(scriptDir, '../subfolder2/1.bmp')

__file__ is a builtin attribute in the module, that tells you the filesystem path of that module.