How to change image format without writing it to disk using Python Pillow

Question

I got Pillow image that i got from the Internet:

response= urllib2.urlopen(<url to gif image>)
img = Image.open(cStringIO.StringIO(response.read()))

I want to use it with tesserocr but it wont work with GIF images.

If I save the image as PNG img.save("tmp.png") and load it img = Image.open("tmp.png") everything works.

Is there a way to do this conversion without writing to disk?

Answer 1

The solution was very simple:

response= urllib2.urlopen(<url to gif image>)
img = Image.open(cStringIO.StringIO(response.read()))
img = img.convert("RGB")

Note that you need to remove the alpha channel info to make image compatible with tesserocr