Prerequisities

Use this to setup a base project:

Django - Blog App Tutorial (Python)

Troubleshooting

Are you encountering the following error: AttributeError: module 'PIL.Image' has no attribute 'ANTIALIAS'?

Try downgrading Pillow:

pip uninstall pillow
pip install Pillow==9.5.0

Step-By-Step Tutorial

Install Dependencies

pip install pillow django-imagekit

Update Settings

Edit mysite/settings.py and add these lines to it:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.messages',
    'django.contrib.staticfiles',
    'imagekit', # here
    'blog'
]

# here
MEDIA_URL = 'media/' 
MEDIA_ROOT = BASE_DIR / 'media'

• MEDIA_URL is the URL prefix, e.g., images will be served as follows: 'mysite.com/media/images/image.png'.
• MEDIA_ROOT is the physical location for these media files.

Configure Media File Serving

Edit mysite/urls.py and add these lines to it:

from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import include, path
from django.conf.urls.static import static # here
from mysite import settings # here

urlpatterns = [
    path('blog/', include('blog.urls')),
    path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
]

# here:
urlpatterns += static(settings.MEDIA_URL, document_root=settings.MEDIA_ROOT)

The static() function allows us to serve media files during development. In production you would typically use something like Nginx to serve the files.

Update Post Model

Edit blog/models.py and add these lines to the Post model:

from django.db import models
from imagekit.models import ImageSpecField # here
from pilkit.processors import Thumbnail # here


class Post(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=255, blank=False, default='')
    body = models.TextField(blank=False, default='')
    slug = models.SlugField(max_length=255, blank=False, unique=True)
    image = models.ImageField(upload_to='images', default='') # here
    # here:
    image_thumbnail = ImageSpecField(source='image',
                                     processors=[Thumbnail(200, 100)],
                                     format='JPEG',
                                     options={'quality': 60})

    def __str__(self):
        return self.title

• ImageField allows users to upload images. In this case, we store the images in the media folder at the project root (make sure to add the media folder to your gitignore file). You could also store the images in a cloud storage, such as Amazon S3.

• ImageSpecField is used for generating thumbnails from the original image. Thumbnails are generated (and cached) the first time they are requested, such as when you visit a page where the image_thumbnail field is used.

Run Migrations

python manage.py makemigrations
python manage.py migrate

Update Post Detail Template

Edit templates/blog/post_detail.html and add these lines to it:

<div class="post">
    <h1>{{ post.title }}</h1>
    <div class="body">{{ post.body }}</div>
    <!-- start -->
    {% if post.image %}
        <img src="{{ post.image_thumbnail.url }}">
        <img src="{{ post.image.url }}">
    {% endif %}
    <!-- end -->
</div>

Upload An Image

Visit /admin/ and add an image to the default blog item:

Result

Visit /blog/how-to-make-money/ and you should see the thumbnail and the original image below it:

The thumbnail is served from the media/CACHE folder:

media/CACHE/images/images/21da-JZerh...jpg

The original image is served from the media/images folder:

media/images/orig.png

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