Using thumbnails in posts generated by thumbnailer plugin - restructuredtext

Question

I've recently moved to Pelican for my blog. I'm writing my posts using rst. I'm now using the thumbnailer plugin to create thumbnails for my posts, the idea being that these will then link to the complete picture. The file looks like this:
|Some reference to image|
text
text
.. |Some reference to image| image:: {filename}images/my-image_small.png
:target: {filename}/images/my-image.png
The tree structure is line this:
[asinha#localhost blogdir]$ tree
.
├── content
│   ├── images
│   │   └── my-image.png
│   └── some-post.rst
└── output
3 directories, 2 files
The issue here is that both image references are supposed to refer to paths in the content/ folder, but the thumbnailer plugin creates images in the output/ folder. So, when pelican runs, it doesn't find the thumbnail images and just replaces them with the alternate text. Even if I remove the {filename} part from the thumbnail specification, it doesn't work, since then it thinks the image should be in output/$postdir/images. How is this supposed to be done? What am I missing? Is what I want not the purpose of the plugin (and what is?)?

Answer 1

I think what you want to achieve is not natively supported by the plugin.
The thumbnail generating part of the code code seems not to tell pelican about the relation of thumbnail and image file.
Nor does it tell pelican at all about the thumbnails in output.
Consequently, linking to the thumbnails has to happen statically.
As of lines 186ff the creation of a gallery which connects thumbnail and image uses manual path operations to get from one file to the other.
This does second the above conclusion of pelican knowing nothing about the thumbnails in output.
I see the following options:
Improve the plugin.
Create a custom rst directive, say tnimg, which realizes what you outlined in your rst code in python. Here, you could do the same as the thumbnail plugin does in its gallery generation code to connect the original image filename with the thumbnail filename.
Create a small pelican plugin which takes the HTML code, searches for image tags and replaces the URL with the correct thumbnail URL. Also you would introduce the anchor tag to link the actual image file.
Look for alternatives. I saw another plugin for creating thumbnails. Maybe this one does something different.
I hope this helps :)