Why is my code failing to access the local machine URL?

Question

I have the following piece of code which downloads an image from the URL. When I give an http link the URL works fine and downloads the image. But when I give a file path of my machine it fails to download. Following piece of code is how I gave the local path. Please advice.

IMAGE_DIR = 'C:\\Users\\mayooranM\\Desktop\\'
PERSONS = [
('Jim Parsons', IMAGE_DIR + 'download.jpg')
]

 FACES = {name: api.detection.detect(url = url)
    for name, url in PERSONS}

for name, face in FACES.iteritems():
    print_result(name, face)

Following is the error I get:

APIError: code=432
url=http://api.faceplusplus.com/detection/detect?  url=C%3A%5CUsers%5CmayooranM%5CDesktop%5Cdownload.jpg&api_secret=kQiSg4egEYbdqzI i242mvZbycNFb2FjE&api_key=26b82781f37e7046629778fa5b24348b
{
    "error": "IMAGE_ERROR_FAILED_TO_DOWNLOAD", 
    "error_code": 1302
}

Answer 1

Well, it may support file:// URI syntax, which would mean you should probably use forward slashes and the file:// prefix, but more likely the problem is that fundamentally a library that accesses a local file is not performing anywhere near the same operations done for accessing a file over the network.

When you're accessing a local file, you're not "downloading" anything at all; you're just reading a file. A lot of libraries written to support remote URIs are not also written for file access, because they assume that you've already figured out whether it's a local file or a network-accessible file before you even use the library.

Answer 2

When using the "url" parameter, Face++ will attempt to download the file from that location... Therefore the URL you pass needs to be publicly accessible (or at least accessible to Face++ servers). A local file path is not accessible and therefore will fail every time.

If the image file can't be made public, then you must POST the image to Face++ with the "img" parameter instead.