How to send image generated by PIL to browser?

Question

I'm using flask for my application. I'd like to send an image (dynamically generated by PIL) to client without saving on disk.

Any idea how to do this ?

Answer 1

First, you can save the image to a tempfile and remove the local file (if you have one):

from tempfile import NamedTemporaryFile
from shutil import copyfileobj
from os import remove

tempFileObj = NamedTemporaryFile(mode='w+b',suffix='jpg')
pilImage = open('/tmp/myfile.jpg','rb')
copyfileobj(pilImage,tempFileObj)
pilImage.close()
remove('/tmp/myfile.jpg')
tempFileObj.seek(0,0)

Second, set the temp file to the response (as per this stackoverflow question):

from flask import send_file

@app.route('/path')
def view_method():
    response = send_file(tempFileObj, as_attachment=True, attachment_filename='myfile.jpg')
    return response