pupyl - A Python Image Search Library

Table of contents

• 🧿 pupyl what?
• 🎉 Getting started
  • 📦 Installation
• 🚸 Usage
  • 🐚 Command line interface
• 📌 Dependencies
• 📝 Documentation
• 🖊️ Citation

🧿 pupyl what?

The pupyl project (pronounced pyoo·piel) is a pythonic library to perform image search tasks (even over animated GIFs). It's intended to make easy reading, indexing, retrieving and maintaining a complete reverse image search engine. You can use it in your own data pipelines, web projects and wherever you find fit!

🎉 Getting started

📦 Installation

Installing pupyl on your environment is pretty easy:

# pypi
pip install pupyl

or

# anaconda
conda install -c policratus pupyl

For installation troubleshooting, visit troubleshooting.

🚸 Usage

You can call pupyl's objects directly from your application code. For this example, a sample database will be indexed and after that, the following image will be used as a query image (credits: @dlanor_s):

pupyl also supports using animated gifs as query images and can store and retrieve it too.

from pupyl.search import PupylImageSearch
from pupyl.web import interface

SEARCH = PupylImageSearch()

SEARCH.index(
    'https://github.com/policratus/pupyl'
    '/raw/main/samples/images.tar.xz'
)

# Using, for instance, a remote image. Local images have pretty faster results.
QUERY_IMAGE = 'https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1520763185298-1b434c919102?w=224&q=70'

[*SEARCH.search(QUERY_IMAGE)]

Disclaimer: the example above creates pupyl assets on your temporary directory. To define a non-volatile database, you should define data_dir parameter.

This will return:

# Here's the simplest possible result
> [486, 12, 203, 176]

With more information and returning image metadata from the results:

# The results with image metadata
[*SEARCH.search(QUERY_IMAGE, return_metadata=True)]

Now an excerpt of the (possible) return is:

[
    {
        "id": 486,
        "internal_path": "/tmp/pupyl/0/486.gif",
        "original_access_time": "2021-12-03T13:23:47",
        "original_file_name": "icegif-5690.gif",
        "original_file_size": "261K",
        "original_path": "/tmp/tmp3gdxlwr6"
    },
    {
        "id": 12,
        "internal_path": "/tmp/pupyl/0/12.gif",
        "original_access_time": "2021-12-03T13:23:46",
        "original_file_name": "roses.gif",
        "original_file_size": "1597K",
        "original_path": "/tmp/tmp3gdxlwr6"
    },
    ...
]

To interact visually, use the web interface:

# Opening the web interface
interface.serve()

A glimpse of the web interface, visualizing the results shown above:

Alternatively, you can interact with pupyl via command line. The same example above in CLI terms:

🐚 Command line interface

# Indexing images
pupyl --data_dir /path/to/your/data/dir index /path/to/images/

# Opening web interface
pupyl --data_dir /path/to/your/data/dir serve

# Searching using command line interface
pupyl --data_dir /path/to/your/data/dir search /path/to/query/image.ext

💡 Type pupyl --help to discover all the CLI's capabilities.

📌 Dependencies

See all dependencies here: dependencies.

📝 Documentation

See a getting started guide and the API reference on https://pupyl.readthedocs.io/.

🖊️ Citation

If you use pupyl in your publications or projects, please cite:

@misc{pupyl,
    author = {Nelson Forte de Souza Junior},
    title = {pupyl - A Python Image Search Library},
    howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/policratus/pupyl}},
    year = {2021}
}