Image type / Web Address Testing images using Google Drive Folder not successful

[Ms. Kelly Powers]

I wish we could upload a test image to ML4Kids when testing an image project stored in the web browser. We are having trouble passing a web address for an image to test the model with. 

I uploaded student test images to a Google Drive folder that is in a publicly shared folder and I passed in the url for the test image when I open it up. We receive this error. 

Error: The test image is a type that cannot be used.(  It is a jpg file and I attached it for you to review) 

Is there a work around to test images that we have in a folder?  Here is an example of the web address that we are sending to ML4Kids 

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Tep1UDuT2HOGwzOWKeWkM_TevH3D5gSd

Here is an example of the image. It is attached. 

Thanks so much for any wisdom!

[Dale Lane]

When you say "I passed in the url for the test image" do you mean that you gave it the URL for the image, or a URL for a web page that happens to contain an image somewhere on the page? 

If it's the latter, then this would not work - as I haven't implemented anything to read a webpage, search it for images, select which image is most likely to be the image wanted to be tested, etc. The URL needs to literally be the URL of an image. 

Kind regards

D

[Ms. Kelly Powers]

I passed in https://drive.google.com/file/d/17XZR4_ul8idjvUttKgWiLQ-33GwkZQID/view, which is a url for an image on my Google Drive. 

Kelly

[Dale Lane]

I'm sorry if this sounds like I'm being pedantic, but that is a URL for a webpage

I've attached a screenshot of what that URL actually returns

Even without looking at specifically what the URL returns, the fact that you see a file name at the top of the page, with Google's mountain-ranges icon for an image, and an "Open with" dynamic menu, etc. all point at the fact that this is a webpage (that contains an image), and not an image. 

To illustrate with an example of one of my images, it's the difference between using:

https://github.com/IBM/taxinomitis/blob/master/mlforkids-api/public/images/project-shoebox.png (is a webpage)

or

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/IBM/taxinomitis/refs/heads/master/mlforkids-api/public/images/project-shoebox.png (is an image)

https://ibb.co/XfR2hm8B (is a webpage)

or

https://i.ibb.co/rKr7CnsP/project-mobilenet.png (is an image)

I'm not saying it's unreasonable for you to expect me to have implemented something that is capable of parsing HTML, reading through a webpage looking for <img> tags, getting the src from that img tag and then fetching that image. (Although in this particular case, it looks like it'd be more complex as the HTML in the Google Drive page appears to be obscuring the image location behind some dynamic scripts - it's not actually in the returned page HTML, perhaps as a mechanism to prevent people using Google Drive as a free image hosting for webpages)

I'm just saying that I've not implemented anything like that. What I've got now just needs the location of an image. 

Normally what students would do would drag an image to the textbox directly, or right-click on an image and use the "Copy image address" menu to get the URL to use. With most sites, either of those work fine. But Google Drive seem to have blocked both of those - again, presumably in an attempt to prevent people using Google Drive as an image host. 

Kind regards

D

[Dale Lane]

> Normally what students would do would drag an image 

> to the textbox directly, or right-click on an image and use

> the "Copy image address" menu to get the URL to use. 

> With most sites, either of those work fine....

To illustrate what I mean, I've recorded a couple of examples:

https://youtu.be/Djc6U-Ixc2Y

https://youtu.be/7FAtxip_FgA 

As I said above, Google Drive seem to block both of those approaches, so you can't do that with your image. But I share this to highlight that it is normally easier than what you're experiencing. 

Kind regards

D