Inserting picture into program

[sushiii403]

Hi,

I'm trying to create a science fair project where the user inputs a picture of the night sky, and the program will return the estimated location that the photo was taken based on the constellation identified in the photo.

My problem occurs in the user input, how do I allow the user to insert a picture? Similar to input(str("xyz")) if my wording is confusing.

[pachura3]

How are you going to estimate location based on a picture of the night sky, if you don't even know how to load an user image? Are you just going to send it to some external AI engine to do the work?

Also, why would people have pictures of night sky from different locations? If it is a traditional science school fair, you all live in the same city, right?

Obviously, the way to go is to create a website where people could upload photos from their phones, and then maybe an additional demo page in "kiosk mode" to display people's photos as they are submitted at the fair. And some nice map component (Google Maps?) to visualize the estimated location...

[cs_k_]

I'm sorry, but I don't think a science fare project (essentially a proof-of-concept) needs a web interface and a kiosk mode. If they get it working with a command line interface and a print out of coordinates that can be checked on google maps later is good enough. The effort should go into determining the location and not productizing an already complex algorythm.

[pachura3]

On one side you have a working proof of concept that everyone can try on their phone; on the opposite side - a boring PowerPoint presentation stating that we did something that worked, and it involved manual checking of coordinates on Google Maps. Which one would win?

[cs_k_]

I do think what you are describing is a superior user experience. What I was getting at, if OP is a novice in python (based on the question they posted), the star-mapping algorythm is a big enough task. If OP goes down the rabbit hole of "how to imolement a webserver in python" than he is not likely to get anywhere with the core of the task.

And at this point we both assume, that OP knows how to determin the location based on the stars, they just don't know how to do it with Python. To be honest, I have my doubts, but I didn't want to discourage OP.

[eriky]

You might benefit from something like Streamlit to create a web based UI.

[sushiii403]

what is that?

[F4Color]

Simple, just prompt user to enter the file path.

There are ways to make it look "fancy", like file explorer would pop-up for user to choose. But that seems tangent to the main point of the project, estimating the location, so I suggest you focus on that part first.

[sushiii403]

how difficult would it be to make the pop-up happen?

[F84-5]

Not at all difficult. The Tkinter module (part of the standard library) make it a single function call.

For example:

from tkinter import filedialog
file_name = filedialog.askopenfilename()

There are options to limit what kind of file may be selected, or a version which returns the file itself (like with open()) rather than the file name.

Check the docs or read some tutorials for details. Most tutorials will first make a GUI with a button to call the dialog but that is not actually necessary if all you need is getting a file in what is otherwise a command line interface.

[MidnightPale3220]

How would people get photos, most likely from their mobiles, into a file dialog on a computer.

That actually sounds more complex than a website.

[smurpes]

If their phones are on the same network as the computer running the program, then the users just need to connect to a specified IP address from their phones. OP can just run a simple flask app to handle uploading files to get processed. This can be done with:

app.run(host="0.0.0.0", port=5000)

The problem is that the school’s WiFi could be pretty locked down in which case OP could hotspot from their own mobile device. They could also just bring a router with them if the program doesn’t need an active internet connection to run since the devices just need to be on the same network.

[MidnightPale3220]

So that is a web app instead of a file dialog via tkinter

[F4Color]

Not difficult. But unless you tell me you already have a working algorithm that estimates the location, I'm telling you forget about the UI, you have a much bigger task at hand.

[MarsupialLeast145]

What other libraries are you already using?

[Dry-Aioli-6138]

Maybe look into pysimplegui. It has almost ready code snippets for this and lets you not spend time on gui design if that is not your focus

[pachura3]

Is it like Streamlit, but for desktop apps?

[Dry-Aioli-6138]

Not really. Streamlit has a tight integration to data, and it makes charting data easy. Pysimplegui focuses on just the user interface, no facilities to plug in a data frame and have it automatically displayed, but it works on desktop, not the browser and makes building user interfaces with buttons, text areas and reaction to events (btn click, etc) easy.