How to load an image in python without using disk storage?

Question

I am writing a flask application that receives two image URLs as parameters. Traditionally, I would download this images on the server local disk and carry out my image processing operations. I am downloading them using following code.

urllib.request.urlretrieve(image1url, image_id + '.jpg')

After this I read the image using :

original_image = Image.open(image_id + '.jpg')

and carry out my Image Processing operations like crop and applying a few filters.

original_crop = original_image.crop((x, y, x + width / 3, y + height / 3))

Also, I use ImageFilter operations on this image. Now this code will be deployed on a server. If i continue this way I will keep downloading and saving images on the disk of the server. Of course, I understand that deleting the images after I am done with my Image Processing operations is one option. But if I get a few 100 calls per second, I might at some point of time use up a lot of space. The application is multi threaded using the call

app.run(threaded=true)

which works like a charm.

I want to know if there is a way to load an image without using disk storage of the server. Thus reducing the hard disk space requirements of my service.

Answer 1

if you don't want to store images in temporary files you can wrap URL content in stream and pass it to Image.open

import io
import urllib.request

from PIL import Image

# your avatar URL as example
url = ('https://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3341748e9b07c9854d50799e0e247fa3'
       '?s=328&d=identicon&response=PG&f=1')
content = urllib.request.urlopen(url).read()
original_image = Image.open(io.BytesIO(content))

Answer 2

You could move them to a known remote location and fetch them back as needed. Using Amazon S3 or a hosted FTP service like BrickFTP are both easy. S3 is especially cheap since you only pay for what you use -- no monthly fee. Brick is a great service if you want to make access to the images as simple as possible for other applications and users but there is a minimum monthly fee.