IMAGEIO

Website: https://imageio.readthedocs.io/

Imageio is a Python library that provides an easy interface to read and write a wide range of image data, including animated images, video, volumetric data, and scientific formats. It is cross-platform, runs on Python 3.6+, and is easy to install.

Professional support is available via Tidelift and xs:code.

Example

Here's a minimal example of how to use imageio. See the docs for more examples.

import imageio
im = imageio.imread('imageio:chelsea.png')  # read a standard image
im.shape  # im is a NumPy array
>> (300, 451, 3)
imageio.imwrite('~/chelsea-gray.jpg', im[:, :, 0])

API in a nutshell

As a user, you just have to remember a handful of functions:

• imread() and imwrite() - for single images
• mimread() and mimwrite() - for image series (animations)
• volread() and volwrite() - for volumetric image data
• get_reader() and get_writer() - for more control (e.g. streaming or compression)
• See the API docs for more information

Features

• Simple interface via a concise set of functions
• Easy to install using Conda or pip
• Few dependencies (only NumPy and Pillow)
• Pure Python, runs on Python 3.6+, and PyPy
• Cross platform, runs on Windows, Linux, macOS
• Lots of supported formats
• Read/Write support for various [resources](https://imageio.readthedocs.io/en/stable/getting_started/requests.html) (files, URLs, bytes(), file objects, ...)
• Code quality is maintained via continuous integration and continous deployment

Dependencies

Minimal requirements:

• Python 3.6+
• NumPy
• Pillow

Optional Python packages:

• imageio-ffmpeg (for working with video files)
• itk or SimpleITK (for ITK plugin)
• astropy (for FITS plugin)
• osgeo (for GDAL plugin)
• imageio-flif (for working with FLIF image files)

Citing imageio

If you use imageio for scientific work, we would appreciate a citation. We have a DOI!

Security contact information

To report a security vulnerability, please use the Tidelift security contact. Tidelift will coordinate the fix and disclosure.

ImageIO for enterprise

Available as part of the Tidelift Subscription.

The maintainers of imageio and thousands of other packages are working with Tidelift to deliver commercial support and maintenance for the open source dependencies you use to build your applications. Save time, reduce risk, and improve code health, while paying the maintainers of the exact dependencies you use. Learn more.

Details

The core of ImageIO is a set of user-facing APIs combined with a plugin manager. API calls choose sensible defaults and then call the plugin manager, which deduces the correct plugin/backend to use for the given resource and file format. The plugin manager then adds sensible backend-specific defaults and then calles one of ImageIOs many backends to perform the actual loading. This allows ImageIO to take care of most of the gory details of loading images for you, while still allowing you to customize the behavior when and where you need to. You can find a more detailed explanation of this process in [our documentation](https://imageio.readthedocs.io/en/stable/getting_started/overview.html).

Contributing

We welcome contributions of any kind. Here are some suggestions on how you are able to contribute

• add missing formats to the format list
• suggest/implement support for new backends
• report/fix any bugs you encounter while using ImageIO

To assist you in getting started with contributing code, take a look at the development section of the docs. You will find instructions on setting up the dev environment as well as examples on how to contribute code.