I'm using scikit-image to read an image:
img = skimage.io.imread(filename)
After doing some manipulations to img, I'd like to save it to an in-memory file (a la StringIO) to pass off to another function, but it looks like skimage.io.imsave requires a filename, not a file handle.
I'd like to avoid hitting the disk (imsave followed by read from another imaging library) if at all possible. Is there a nice way to get imsave (or some other scikit-image-friendly function) to work with StringIO?
Update: 2020-05-07
We now recommend using the imageio library for image reading and writing. Also, with Python 3, StringIO changes to BytesIO:
from io import BytesIO
import imageio
buf = BytesIO()
imageio.imwrite(buf, image, format='png')
scikit-image stores images as numpy arrays, therefore you can use a package such as matplotlib to do so:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from StringIO import StringIO
s = StringIO()
plt.imsave(s, img)
This may be worth adding as default behaviour to skimage.io.imsave, so if you want you can also file an issue at https://github.com/scikit-image/scikit-image.