displaying grid of images in jupyter notebook

Question

I have a dataframe with a column containing 495 rows of URLs. I want to display these URLs in jupyter notebook as a grid of images. The first row of the dataframe is shown here. Any help is appreciated.

id           latitude     longitude     owner             title                          url
23969985288 37.721238   -123.071023 7679729@N07 There she blows!    https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4491/2396998528...

I have tried the following way,

from IPython.core.display import display, HTML
for index, row in data1.iterrows():
  display(HTML("<img src='%s'>"%(i["url"])))

However, running of above code displays message

> TypeError                         Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-117-4c2081563c17> in <module>()
      1 from IPython.core.display import display, HTML
      2 for index, row in data1.iterrows():
----> 3   display(HTML("<img src='%s'>"%(i["url"])))

TypeError: string indices must be integers

Answer 1

Your idea of using IPython.core.display with HTML is imho the best approach for that kind of task. matplotlib is super inefficient when it comes to plotting such a huge number of images (especially if you have them as URLs).
There's a small package I built based on that concept - it's called ipyplot

import ipyplot

images = data1['url'].values
labels = data1['id'].values

ipyplot.plot_images(images, labels, img_width=150)

You would get a plot similar to this:

Answer 2

The best way to show a grid of images in the Jupyter notebook is probably using matplotlib to create the grid, since you can also plot images on matplotlib axes using imshow.

I'm using a 3x165 grid, since that is 495 exactly. Feel free to mess around with that to change the dimensions of the grid.

import urllib
f, axarr = plt.subplots(3, 165)
curr_row = 0
for index, row in data1.iterrows():
     # fetch the url as a file type object, then read the image
     f = urllib.request.urlopen(row["url"])
     a = plt.imread(f)

     # find the column by taking the current index modulo 3
     col = index % 3
     # plot on relevant subplot
     axarr[col,curr_row].imshow(a)
     if col == 2:
         # we have finished the current row, so increment row counter
         curr_row += 1