Cannot get images to display in Django(1.3) project - django

Question

I'm making a simple Django project but I cannot get any images to display in my pages.
Django documentation at https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/howto/static-files/#basic-usage states
Basic usage Put your static files somewhere that staticfiles will find
them.
By default, this means within static/ subdirectories of apps in your
INSTALLED_APPS.
Your project will probably also have static assets that aren’t tied to
a particular app. The STATICFILES_DIRS setting is a tuple of
filesystem directories to check when loading static files. It’s a
search path that is by default empty. See the STATICFILES_DIRS docs
how to extend this list of additional paths.
Additionally, see the documentation for the STATICFILES_FINDERS
setting for details on how staticfiles finds your files.
Make sure that django.contrib.staticfiles is included in your
INSTALLED_APPS.
For local development, if you are using runserver or adding
staticfiles_urlpatterns to your URLconf, you’re done with the setup –
your static files will automatically be served at the default (for
newly created projects) STATIC_URL of /static/.
You’ll probably need to refer to these files in your templates. The
easiest method is to use the included context processor which allows
template code like:
See Referring to
static files in templates for more details, including an alternate
method using a template tag.
So I did this in settings.py:
STATICFILES_DIRS = (
'/home/abc/django/project1/media/',
)
and enabled 'django.contrib.staticfiles',
In media, I have a folder img, which has various jpg files.
In my template, I have this as one of the lines:
<img src="{{STATIC_URL}}img/{{var}}.jpg">
When I'm passing var to this template via my view.
The HTML page seems to render this tag as "<img src="img/abc.jpg"> where var="abc".
But my browser refuses to display the image. What have I done wrong?

Answer 1

Did you see ths part in the documentation:
If {{ STATIC_URL }} isn't working in your template, you're probably not using RequestContext when rendering the template.
Do you also use RequestContext in your view to render the template?

Answer 2

Here is an alternative approach:
settings.py:
import os
PROJECT_DIR = os.path.dirname(__file__) + '/../'
STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join(PROJECT_DIR, 'media/')
STATIC_URL = '/media/'
In your template:
{% load staticfiles %}
<img src="{% static img/foo.jpg %}" />
If you need to pass a variable, use the prefix method:
{% load staticfiles %}
<img src="{% get_static_prefix %}img/{{var}}.jpg" />