Question

I was searching the web for my question and couldn’t find a clear answeror any example.

Basically, I want to use sorl and want to resize the source image during the Model save time to resize it down to 640×480 size, so that I don’t end-up storing user’s original 2.5 MB files on the disk. I will then use templatetags to create regular thumbnails out of my source as documented in sorl.

I came across couple of sources refer to use ThumbnailField model field that is supposed to be available in sorl.thumbnail.fields. See the link here. However, in my up-to-date sorl copy from the trunk I don’t see any ThumbnailField or ImageWithThumbnailsField. My attempt to import it in the model fails accordingly. I see these references are old though and wondering whether I can achieve the same with up-to-date sorl.

On the other hand sorl documentation indicates only ImageField from sorl.thumbnail (see here) that does not have any size argument to control the source resizing.

BTW, I see this functionality is available with easy_thumbnail that takes an input parameter source_resize.

Any help will be appreciated!

SUMMARY

I accepted the below answer, however I feel natural sorl support for this use case can be very useful – i.e. adding resize_source param to sorl’s ImageField to allow resizing the source image. Below are two factors why this can be useful in the field:

1. Not to store user’s huge original images if your app has no need for it. Saving disk space.

2. Not to spend extra CPU for resizing thumbnails from that huge source images if you don’t have specific extreme high quality reasons. To avoid this one may write nested tags in templates to thumbnail from smaller size images but it can become annoying very soon.

Answer 1

Sorl’s ImageField that you mention, is just a normal Django ImageField with the added benefit of managing the deletion of cached thumbnails. There’s no resizing done on the initial upload – that’s something you have to implement yourself manually via the view you are using to upload. The docs show how to go about this. You can use sorl in that view to do the actual resize operation itself, using the low level API examlpes

EDIT

A quicker alternative is to just resize the image when the model is being saved using sorl. You can do something like the following (completely untested though!)

from sorl.thumbnail import get_thumbnail

class Foo(models.Model):
    image = models.ImageField(upload_to...)

    def save(self, *args, **kwargs):
        if not self.id:
            # Have to save the image (and imagefield) first
            super(Foo, self).save(*args, **kwargs)
            # obj is being created for the first time - resize
            resized = get_thumbnail(self.image, "100x100" ...)
            # Manually reassign the resized image to the image field
            self.image.save(resized.name, resized.read(), True)
        super(Foo, self).save(*args, **kwargs)

this will mean that you will have 2 versions of the same image on disk – one where the django image field decides to save it (upload_to path) and one where sorl thumbnail has saved it’s resized thumbnail. This, along with the fact the image is uploaded and saved twice, are the disadvantages of this approach. It’s quicker to implement though