Get Serving URL for images stored in Storage (Similar to App Engine Image Class)

[saxenanurag]

Would it be possible to get something similar to get_serving_url in app engine (https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/refdocs/google.appengine.api.images#google.appengine.api.images.get_serving_url) using this library as well?
Thanks.

[dhermes]

Thanks @saxenanurag, you can already do this to some degree:

from gcloud import storage
client = storage.Client()  # Implicit environ set-up
bucket = client.bucket('my-bucket')
blob = bucket.blob('my-blob')
url_lifetime = 3600  # Seconds in an hour
serving_url = blob.generate_signed_url(url_lifetime)

I'm going to close this out, but if you think this doesn't meet your needs, I'm happy to re-open and discuss.

[saxenanurag]

Does this mean that the link expires in 3600 seconds? Thanks.

[dhermes]

Yes it does. Your other alternative is to use the publicRead ACL: https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/access-control

and then there is a Blob.public_url property to use.

[saxenanurag]

That is not what get_serving url does. Here is the quote from the app engine documentation:

Using get_serving_url() allows you to dynamically resize and crop images, so you don't need to store
different image sizes on the server. This method returns a URL that serves the image, and transformations to the image are encoded in this URL.

https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/images/

I am working on a project that is currently on App Engine. We are moving it to Compute Engine but are still using Cloud Storage for static file storage. get_serving_url helped in serving images in multiple sizes, without giving away the folder structure of the storage.

[dhermes]

Actually doing the resizing is a feature of App Engine that isn't present in the Cloud Storage API. This library simply offers the API methods (and tries to make them helpful and useful). Resizing images goes outside that scope, sorry.

[dhermes]

@jgeewax Do you know if there is any Cloud API (outside of GAE) that can do resizing and serving on the fly?

[robin-anil]

+1 would love to see get_serving_url functionality come to google cloud storage api.

[jgeewax]

So... I'm just gonna leave this here.... https://gist.github.com/carlo/5379498

[robin-anil]

Thats a great tip @jgeewax However we don't want this to be taken down from under us, we are looking for a serious SLA on this one. We have had issues with various beta apis breaking and causing production issues. I am a Xoogler and remembers how bad Google used to be at keeping API. So forgive my caution.

I would really like Google to provide a public API for this and hope this comes with standard Google cloud storage api, since we have the originals in cloudstorage.

[theacodes]

@r-tock if you need something production-ready, I would highly recommend that you generate all of the sizes you need ahead-of-time.

You can even write a small App Engine application that listens for object uploads and then generates the resized versions using PIL and uploads them.

[jgeewax]

Yea, that's completely unofficial.

AFAIK, we don't have an API for dealing with images that way. The best route to go is probably a mini GAE app as @jonparrott said.

[robin-anil]

@jonparrott @jgeewax I am doing exactly that, I have a mini App engine app which return the serving url from any of our internal buckets.

Given that this Api does not work on the new Managed container runtime, I am worried about the future of that API as well. That is why I would like it to be ported to either the new Managed container runtime or directly in the Google storage api.