How do I read image data from a URL in Python?

python python-imaging-library
Daniel Quinn picture Daniel Quinn · Sep 12, 2011 · Viewed 250k times · Source

What I'm trying to do is fairly simple when we're dealing with a local file, but the problem comes when I try to do this with a remote URL.

Basically, I'm trying to create a PIL image object from a file pulled from a URL. Sure, I could always just fetch the URL and store it in a temp file, then open it into an image object, but that feels very inefficient.

Here's what I have:

Image.open(urlopen(url))

It flakes out complaining that seek() isn't available, so then I tried this:

Image.open(urlopen(url).read())

But that didn't work either. Is there a Better Way to do this, or is writing to a temporary file the accepted way of doing this sort of thing?

Answer

Andres Kull picture Andres Kull · May 6, 2014

In Python3 the StringIO and cStringIO modules are gone.

In Python3 you should use:

from PIL import Image
import requests
from io import BytesIO

response = requests.get(url)
img = Image.open(BytesIO(response.content))

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