Downloading Images from VFB Using VFBconnect

This guide will show you how to use VFBconnect to download images from the Virtual Fly Brain (VFB) based on a dataset.

Introduction

VFBconnect is a Python package that provides an interface to the Virtual Fly Brain (VFB) API. It allows users to query the VFB database and download data, including images.

Installation

Before you can use VFBconnect, you need to install it. You can do this using pip:

pip install vfb-connect

Downloading Images

To download images from VFB using VFBconnect, you need to first import the package and create a client:

from vfb_connect.cross_server_tools import VfbConnect
vc = VfbConnect()

Next, you can use the get_images method to download images. This method requires the dataset ID as an argument:

dataset_id = 'your_dataset_id'
images = vc.get_images(dataset_id)

This will return a list of images from the specified dataset. Each image is represented as a dictionary with information such as the image ID, title, and URL.

To download the images, you can loop through the list and use the urlretrieve function from the urllib.request module:

import urllib.request

for image in images:
    url = image['image_url']
    filename = image['image_id'] + '.jpg'
    urllib.request.urlretrieve(url, filename)

This will download each image and save it as a JPEG file in the current directory. The filename is the image ID.

Conclusion

This guide showed you how to use VFBconnect to download images from the Virtual Fly Brain based on a dataset. With VFBconnect, you can easily access and download data from VFB for your research.


Last modified September 19, 2023: removing wrong escapes (5d54d42)