Download and Save Image into Model using django-imagekit and Python 3

I am currently working on a project where I need my model to have an avatar. I am using Python 3 and Django for this project. The thing is, I needed some data for this project. So I decided to create a script that will read the data from Wikipedia’s API and save it in my database.

I am currently using django-imagekit to handle the image processing for my model’s avatar. My model looks something like this:

from django.db import models
from imagekit.models import ImageSpecField
from imagekit.processors import ResizeToFill

class Person(models.Model):
    avatar = models.ImageField(upload_to='avatars', default='')
    avatar_thumbnail = ImageSpecField(source='avatar',
                                      processors=[ResizeToFill(300, 200)],
                                      format='JPEG',
                                      options={'quality': 80})

With Wikipedia’s API, I can somehow get the image URL for the article I’m looking for. My problem was how would I be able to save the image from the image URL. It took me a while to do this. The closest I found was this answer from Stackoverflow. I had to modify it because I am using Python 3 in my project.

from django.core.files.base import ContentFile
from io import BytesIO
from urllib.request import urlopen

input_file = BytesIO(urlopen(img_url).read()) # img_url is simply the image URL

person = Person.objects.create()
person.avatar.save("image.jpg", ContentFile(input_file.getvalue()), save=False)
person.save()

I streamed the image using the builtin BytesIO object in Python 3 and put it onto Django’s ContentFile before finally saving it in the Person object.

This worked well for me. I am not sure whether there’s a better way of doing this but if there is, I would love to know!