ipython notebook - uploading from and saving to subdirectories?

Question

Change IPython working directory Inserting image into IPython notebook markdown

Hi, I've read the two above links, and the second link seems most relevant. what the person describes - simply calling the subdirectory - doesn't work for me. For instance, I have an image 'gephi.png' in '/Graphs/gephi.png' But when I write the following

from IPython.display import Image
path = "/Graphs/gephi.png"
i = Image(path)
i

no image pops up - Yup. No error. Just nothing pops up besides an empty square box image.

Clarification: When I move the image to the regular director, the image pops up fine. My only code change is path = "gephi.png"

Answer 1

IPython's Image display object takes three kinds of arguments

The first is raw image data (e.g. the results of open(filename).read():

with open("Graphs/graph.png") as f:
    data = f.read()
Image(data=data)

The second model is to load an image from a filename. This is functionally the same as above, but IPython does the reading from the file:

Image(filename="Graphs/graph.png")

The third form is passing URLs. External URLs can be used, but relative URIs will serve files relative to the notebook's own directory:

Image(url="Graphs/graph.png")

Where this can get confusing is if you don't tell IPython which one of these you are specifying, and you just pass the one argument positionally:

Image("Graphs/graph.png")

IPython tries to guess what you mean in this case:

1. if it looks like a path and points to an existing file, use it as a filename
2. if it looks like a URL, use it as a URL
3. otherwise, fallback on embedding the string as raw png data

That #3 is the source of the most confusion. If you pass it a filename that doesn't exist, you will get a broken image:

Image("/Graphs/graph.png")

Note that URLs to local files must be relative. Absolute URLs will generally be wrong:

Image(url="/Graphs/graph.png")

An example notebook illustrating these things.