["python","python-imaging-library"]
How to write PNG image to string with the PIL?

I have generated an image using PIL. How can I save it to a string in memory? The Image.save() method requires a file. I'd like to have several such images stored in dictionary.
You can use the BytesIO class to get a wrapper around strings that behaves like a file. The BytesIO object provides the same interface as a file, but saves the contents just in memory: import io with io.BytesIO() as output: image.save(output, format="GIF") contents = output.getvalue() You have to explicitly specify the output format with the format parameter, otherwise PIL will raise an error when trying to automatically detect it. If you loaded the image from a file it has a format property that contains the original file format, so in this case you can use format=image.format. In old Python 2 versions before introduction of the io module you would have used the StringIO module instead.