How do I read image data from a URL in Python

Question

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

User · Accepted Answer

For those of you who use Pillow  from version 2 8 0 you can   from PIL import Image import urllib2  im   Image open urllib2 urlopen url     or if you use requests   from PIL import Image import requests  im   Image open requests get url  stream True  raw    References    https   github com python-pillow Pillow pull 1151 https   github com python-pillow Pillow blob master CHANGES rst 280-2015-04-01

User · Answer

For those doing some sklearn numpy post processing  i e  Deep learning  you can wrap the PIL object with np array    This might save you from having to Google it like I did    from PIL import Image import requests import numpy as np from StringIO import StringIO  response   requests get url  img   np array Image open StringIO response content

User · Answer

Manually wrapping in BytesIO is no longer needed since PIL  gt   2 8 0  Just use Image open response raw   Adding on top of Vin  cius s comment  You should pass stream True as noted https   requests readthedocs io en master user quickstart  raw-response-content So img   Image open requests get url  stream True  raw

User · Answer

USE urllib request urlretrieve   AND PIL Image open   TO DOWNLOAD AND READ IMAGE DATA   import requests import urllib request import PIL urllib request urlretrieve  quot https   i imgur com ExdKOOz png quot    quot sample png quot   img   PIL Image open  quot sample png quot   img show    or Call requests get url  with url as the address of the object file to download via a GET request  Call io BytesIO obj  with obj as the content of the response to load the raw data as a bytes object  To load the image data  call PIL Image open bytes obj  with bytes obj as the bytes object  import io response   requests get  quot https   i imgur com ExdKOOz png quot   image bytes   io BytesIO response content  img   PIL Image open image bytes  img show

User · Answer

Python 3  from urllib request import urlopen from PIL import Image  img   Image open urlopen url   img   Jupyter Notebook and IPython  import IPython url    https   newevolutiondesigns com images freebies colorful-background-14 jpg  IPython display Image url  width   250    Unlike other methods  this method also works in a for loop

User · Answer

To directly get image as numpy array without using PIL import requests  io import matplotlib pyplot as plt   response   requests get url  content img   plt imread io BytesIO response   format  JPG   plt imshow img

User · Answer

select the image in chrome  right click on it  click on Copy image address  paste it into a str variable  my url  to read the image   import shutil import requests  my url    https   www washingtonian com wp-content uploads 2017 06 6-30-17-goat-yoga-congressional-cemetery-1-994x559 jpg  response   requests get my url  stream True  with open  my image png    wb   as file      shutil copyfileobj response raw  file  del response   open it   from PIL import Image  img   Image open  my image png   img show

User · Answer

you could try using a StringIO  import urllib  cStringIO  file   cStringIO StringIO urllib urlopen URL  read    img   Image open file

User · Answer

Use StringIO to turn the read string into a file-like object   from StringIO import StringIO import urllib  Image open StringIO urllib requests urlopen url  read

User · Answer

The arguably recommended way to do image input output these days is to use the dedicated package ImageIO  Image data can be read directly from a URL with one simple line of code   from imageio import imread image   imread  https   cdn sstatic net Sites stackoverflow img logo png     Many answers on this page predate the release of that package and therefore do not mention it  ImageIO started out as component of the Scikit-Image toolkit  It supports a number of scientific formats on top of the ones provided by the popular image-processing library PILlow  It wraps it all in a clean API solely focused on image input output  In fact  SciPy removed its own image reader writer in favor of ImageIO

User · Answer

I use the requests library   It seems to be more robust   from PIL import Image import requests from StringIO import StringIO  response   requests get url  img   Image open StringIO response content

User · Answer

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

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

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