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pythonpython-imaging-librarypickle

Pickleable Image Object

How do I create a pickleable file from a PIL Image object such that you could save those images as a single pickle file then maybe upload to another computer such as a server running PIL and unpickle it there?

Solution

  • You can convert the Image object into data then you can pickle it:

    image = {
    'pixels': im.tostring(),
    'size': im.size,
    'mode': im.mode,
}

    And back to an Image:

    im = Image.fromstring(image['mode'], image['size'], image['pixels'])

    NOTE: As astex mentioned, if you're using Pillow (which is recommended instead of PIL), the tostring() method is deprecated for tobytes(). Likewise with fromstring() for frombytes().