Photologue thumbnails not cached (displayed as broken image links)

Question

Both my admin and site pages do not display thumbnails of my images correctly:

My project is completely borrowed from the following photologue tutorial: https://github.com/jdriscoll/django-photologue/tree/master/example_project

I am using Django 1.6.2 and Photologue 2.7. All requirements were installed according to the tutorial.

I made absolutely no changes to the tutorial source code, successfully added a gallery and photos (from admin page) to the database and successfully did a synchdb, migrate, and plinit command.

My "cache" directory is empty however, as if the thumbnails simply aren't being generated even though I manually force pre-cache images to be cached using plcache command taken from the docs: https://code.google.com/p/django-photologue/wiki/ManagementCommands

And, all of my images are pre-cache so I'm really not sure why they aren't getting cached...:

The debugger in eclipse pydev tells me it is attempting to locate the thumbnails, but like I mentioned before they are not being cached so it prints:

[08/Mar/2014 16:51:42] "GET /media/photologue/photos/cache/pic3_thumbnail.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 1780

According to this post this error might be caused by an incorrect MEDIA_URL or MEDIA_ROOT setting: sorl-thumbnail not creating thumbnails

However, my media root and url were set by the tutorial I'm borrowing from which I assume to be set correctly.

This problem is identical to the one reported on this google group forum: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/django-photologue/tu4IVekLJJo

Has anyone had a similar issue to this before? How might I get the thumbnails to cache and be displayed?

Answer 1

As hinted at in a few of the links I referenced, Pillow was the culprit. I installed 2.2.1 using pip install Pillowand although the install finished successfully, a simple test failed such as: from PIL import Image

Upon viewing this post: Installing Pillow for Python on Windows

I went ahead and used the executable installer: http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#pillow

I was able to successfully perform the above test.

With Pillow successfully installed and tested, the cache management command, plcache, finally worked, the "cache" folder was filled, and the thumbnails are now shown in my site!

Answer 2

I'm the current maintainer of django-photologue. Thanks for the detailed bug report - Pillow/PIL seems to be once again a source of problems. Hopefully, the team who have taken over PIL (and renamed it Pillow) will soon be making major improvements to it.

I've added some notes to the project documentation about checking that Pillow has successfully installed, which will go into the next release. For anyone else who runs into this problem, the updated instructions are here.