There is a way to read the images for my convolutional neural network directly from my desktop?

Question

I'm training a Convolutional Neural Network using Google-Colaboratory. I have my data (images) stored in Google Drive and I'm able to use it correctly. However sometimes the process to read the images is too slow and does not work (other times the process is faster and I have no problem reading the images). In order to read the images from Google Drive I use:

from google.colab import drive 
drive.mount('/content/drive') 
!unzip -u "/content/drive/My Drive/the folder/files.zip" 

IMAGE_PATH = '/content/drive/My Drive/the folder'
file_paths = glob.glob(path.join(IMAGE_PATH, '*.png')) 

and sometimes works and other times not or it is too slow :).

Either way I would like to read my data from a folder on my desktop without using google drive but I'm not able to do this.

I'm trying the following:

IMAGE_PATH = 'C:/Users/path/to/my/folder' 

file_paths = glob.glob(path.join(IMAGE_PATH, '*.png')) 

But I get an error saying that the directory/file does not exist.

Answer 1

Google Colab cannot directly access our local machine dataset because it runs on a separate virtual machine on the cloud. We need to upload the dataset into Google Drive then we can load it into Google Colab’s runtime for model building.

For that you need to follow the steps given below:

1. Create a zip file of your large dataset and then upload this file in your Google Drive.

2. Now, open the Google Colab with the same google id and mount the Google Drive using the below code and authorize to access the drive:

from google.colab import drive
drive.mount('/content/drive')

Your uploaded zip file will be available in the Google Colab mounted drive /drive/MyDrive/ in left pane.

3. To read the dataset into the Google Colab, you need to unzip the folder and extract its contents into the /tmp folder using the code below.

import zipfile
import os
zip_ref = zipfile.ZipFile('/content/drive/MyDrive/train.zip', 'r') #Opens the zip file in read mode zip_ref.extractall('/tmp') #Extracts the files into the /tmp folder
zip_ref.close()

You can check the extracted file in /drive/train folder in left pane.

4. Now finally you need to join the path of your dataset to use it in the Google Colab's runtime environment.

train_dataset = os.path.join('/tmp/train/') # dataset