Python: Get string value of a PIL Image without writing to a temporary file

It's often useful to fetch the raw image data without having to save it to a file first (eg. as serving images by HTTP or sending email attachments)

To do that, we make use of the class StringIO.

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1.import StringIO

2. 

3.# Save the file to a temporary file because that's how email attachments work

4.output = StringIO.StringIO()

5.pil_image.save(output, format = "PNG")

6.email.attach(filename = "whatever.png", mimetype = "image/png", content = output.getvalue())

7.output.close()

And there you have it!

Source

• Python PIL: how to write PNG image to string