IsADirectoryError: [Errno 21] Is a directory: '/'

Question

I am trying to use Images stored inside the directory by using this code,

import random

path = "/content/drive/MyDrive/Colab Notebooks/Low Images/*.png"
low_light_images = glob(path)
for image_path in random.choice(low_light_images):
    original_image, output_image = inferer.infer(image_path)
    plot_result(original_image, output_image)

But getting this error,

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
IsADirectoryError                         Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-62-668719a88426> in <module>()
      4 low_light_images = glob(path)
      5 for image_path in random.choice(low_light_images):
----> 6     original_image, output_image = inferer.infer(image_path)
      7     plot_result(original_image, output_image)

1 frames
/usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/PIL/Image.py in open(fp, mode)
   2841 
   2842     if filename:
-> 2843         fp = builtins.open(filename, "rb")
   2844         exclusive_fp = True
   2845 

IsADirectoryError: [Errno 21] Is a directory: '/'

How can I resolve this? Full Code Link: here

Answer 1

The line

for image_path in random.choice(low_light_images):

is grabbing a random filepath such as

for image_path in "/content/drive/MyDrive/Colab Notebooks/Low Images/some_image.png":

And when the for loop starts image_path will end up containing the first character which is a /, and you can see the problem.

To randomly loop over all the data use random.shuffle. (there is alsorandom.choices with an s at the end and random.sample that will grab a random subset of all your images).

low_light_images = glob(path)
random.shuffle(low_light_images)
for image_path in low_light_images:

It's easiest to debug stuff if you can simplify the problem to a short MVCE. When using random functions, I will replace the random function with an example of something that it outputs that creates the error condition, like I showed above. Another thing I do is sometimes I will need a sanity check that my variables contain the data I think they contain, and so I will print them out (or you can use a debugger). Doing that we would see that image_path contains a / instead of the expected file path.