I’ve just released version 1.1 of the Panoptes Client for Python. The changelog has a full list of what’s new, but there are a few things I wanted to highlight, the first two of which will make it substantially faster to create new subjects:

• Multithreaded media uploads – the client will automatically use several threads to upload media when you first save a new subject. So, for example, if you create a subject which has three images they will all upload simultaneously (up to five simultaneous uploads, then it will queue them).
• Multithreaded subject creation – you can also simultaneously create the subjects themselves. That means if you’re creating, say, a thousand subjects, the client can queue them all and create up to five of them simultaneously. This works in conjunction with the media uploads, using one combined queue for the subject creation and the media uploads, to avoid overloading the network and to make sure the subject creation doesn’t get too far ahead of the uploads. This one isn’t automatic – you’ll need to create your subjects with the new SubjectSet.async_saves() context manager to take advantage of it.
• Retries for all GET requests – we’re quite proud of how reliable the Zooniverse platform is, but sometimes server-side errors do happen. The client will now automatically retry all GET requests (i.e. the ones that don’t modify any data) if an error occurs, improving reliability.
• Retries for batch linking operations – similar to above, the client will retry any add/remove operations via the new LinkCollection class, which handles linking groups of objects (i.e. subjects to a subject set, subjects to a collection, etc.). This means you should see far fewer failures when linking thousands of subjects to a subject set, for example.
• Context manager for multiple connections – the Panoptes class can now act as a context manager, providing a safe way to perform operations as multiple users (for example, in a web app).

You can install the update by running pip install -U panoptes-client. Any bugs or issues should be raised via GitHub.

Hot on the heels of last week’s update, I’ve just released version 1.0.3 of the Python Panoptes Client, which fixes a bug introduced in the previous release. If you encounter a TypeError when you try to create subjects, please update to this new version and that should fix it.

This release also updates the default client ID that is used to identify the client to the Panoptes API. This is to ensure that each of our API clients is using a unique ID.

As before, you can install the update by running pip install -U panoptes-client.

We’ve just released an update for the Panoptes Client Python module which fixes a couple of bugs with saving subjects:

• Fix saving subjects with updated metadata
• Fix calling Subject.save() when nothing has changed

You can install the updates by running pip install -U panoptes-client.