Search code examples
pythonpython-imaging-libraryurllib2

How do I open an image from the internet in PIL?

I would like to find the dimensions of an image on the internet. I tried using

from PIL import Image
import urllib2 as urllib
fd = urllib.urlopen("http://a/b/c")
im = Image.open(fd)
im.size

as suggested in this answer, but I get the error message 

addinfourl instance has no attribute 'seek'

I checked and objects returned by urllib2.urlopen(url) do not seem to have a seek method according to dir.

So, what do I have to do to be able to load an image from the Internet into PIL?

Solution

  • You might consider using io.BytesIO for forward compatibility.
    The StringIO and cStringIO modules do not exist in Python 3.

    from PIL import Image
import urllib2 as urllib
import io

fd = urllib.urlopen("http://a/b/c")
image_file = io.BytesIO(fd.read())
im = Image.open(image_file)