Installation

Getting Easy Thumbnails REST running takes one install plus a quick check that your easy-thumbnails setup is in place. The package depends on django, djangorestframework, and easy-thumbnails, so pip pulls those in for you if they aren’t already installed.

1. Install the package

pip install easy-thumbnails-rest

That’s the only install step. There’s no app to add to INSTALLED_APPS for this package itself — it just provides serializer fields you import and use.

2. Confirm your prerequisites

The fields read your existing easy-thumbnails configuration, so a few things from that library need to be in place first:

• easy_thumbnails is in INSTALLED_APPS:

  INSTALLED_APPS = [
      # ...
      'easy_thumbnails',
  ]

• Your image fields use easy-thumbnails’ ThumbnailerImageField instead of Django’s plain ImageField:

  from django.db import models
  from easy_thumbnails.fields import ThumbnailerImageField
  
  
  class Profile(models.Model):
      image = ThumbnailerImageField(upload_to='photos')

• THUMBNAIL_ALIASES is defined in settings.py with at least one alias:

  THUMBNAIL_ALIASES = {
      '': {
          'avatar': {'size': (50, 50), 'crop': True},
      },
  }

  If you haven’t set this up yet, see the easy-thumbnails thumbnail aliases docs for the full structure.

3. Import the fields

The three fields live in easy_thumbnails_rest.serializers:

from easy_thumbnails_rest.serializers import (
    ThumbnailerSerializer,
    ThumbnailerListSerializer,
    ThumbnailerJSONSerializer,
)

Caution

The fields build absolute URLs, which means they need the current request in the serializer’s context. DRF’s generic views and viewsets pass request into serializer context automatically, so this works with no effort there. If you instantiate a serializer by hand, you must pass it yourself: MySerializer(instance, context={'request': request}). Without it the field raises a KeyError on 'request'.

Next steps

• Usage — wire the fields into a serializer and see what each one returns.
• Configuration — how THUMBNAIL_ALIASES targets and aliases map to each field.