How to return values of a function performed on an object without modifying an object?

Question

I am new to oop. I am writing some code to modify an image and then perform a search function on that image looking for some specific features. The search function will be used on multiple image types, which is why I made it part of the base class. My issue is that the below function (search) returns my obj as a tuple, instead of returning the image for further 'processing'. I need both image(object) and x, y values.

class image:
    def search(self, image):
        # Perform some search function
        return x, y # where x, y is the pixel location

class specific_image_type(image):
    def process(self, image):
        # process image
        return processed_image
    
    def search(self):
        return super().search(processed_image)

I could do something like this....however the object now has a tuple and and image in it. Is there a better way to design this so the image is the returned object and x, y are returned separately?

  class image:
        def search(self, image):
            # Perform some search function
            return x, y, image 

Answer 1

You would normally use attributes to maintain state in a class instance:

class image:
    def __init__(self, image):
        self.image = image

    def search(self):
        # Perform some search function on self.image
        # ...
        return x, y

class specific_image_type(image):
    def process(self):
        # process self.image and store result in self.image
        # ...

Here it is not necessary to override the search method. The inherited one is fine.

Use like:

img = specific_image_type(my_image)
img.process()
x, y = img.search()