How to display objects as images in IPython
IPython has some neat functionality for displaying objects in ways that can be
more informative than the standard __repr__ representation. Both the
IPython notebook and qtconsole support the display of png, jpeg and svg images.
Furthermore, the IPython notebook can also display html, javascript, json and
latex.
If you simply want to display an image you can achieve this using the
IPython.display.Image class.
>>> from IPython.display import Image
>>> image = Image('tiny_tjelvar.png')
>>> image
The last image call would result in the image below being displayed in the
IPython qtconsole/notebook.
However, suppose that you wanted to create an image representation of your own
class. Let us illustrate this with the hypothetical example of an
ImageFile class that simply stores the location of an image.
class ImageFile(object):
"""Class for storing an image location."""
def __init__(self, fpath):
self.fpath = fpath
def _repr_png_(self):
return open(self.fpath, 'r').read()
The usage of the class above would be along the lines of the below.
>>> im_file = ImageFile('tiny_tjelvar.png')
>>> im_file
The example above would fall over if the file was not in png format. Let us make the code a little bit more robust by adding a naive file format check.
class ImageFile(object):
"""Class for storing an image location."""
def __init__(self, fpath):
self.fpath = fpath
self.format = fpath.split('.')[-1]
def _repr_png_(self):
if self.format == 'png':
return open(self.fpath, 'r').read()
Finally, let us extend the class to be able to deal with jpeg and svg images as well.
class ImageFile(object):
"""Class for storing an image location."""
def __init__(self, fpath):
self.fpath = fpath
self.format = fpath.split('.')[-1]
def _repr_png_(self):
if self.format == 'png':
return open(self.fpath, 'r').read()
def _repr_jpeg_(self):
if self.format == 'jpeg' or self.format == 'jpg':
return open(self.fpath, 'r').read()
def _repr_svg_(self):
if self.format == 'svg':
return open(self.fpath, 'r').read()
You now have a class that stores image file paths and has the capability to interactively display the images using either IPython qtconsole or IPython notebook.