How to store an image in a mongodb document using python and pillow?

Question

I have the following code that creates a thumbnail from a request to a url:

r = requests.get(image_url, stream=True, headers=headers)
size = 500, 500
img = Image.open(r.raw)
thumb = ImageOps.fit(img, size, Image.ANTIALIAS)

At this point I would like to store the image inside a mongo document like so:

photo = {
    'thumbnail': img,
    'source': source,
    'tags': tags,
    'creationDate': datetime.now(),
}

Obviously that won't work so what kind of transformation do I need to apply before I can do this?

This is a bad idea, never ever ever... ever... store an image in a database... just don't. Store a reference to a url of its location... — Aydin, Commented Feb 7, 2016 at 10:52
It's a ~16KB thumbnail, why not store it in binary? do you actually have a good reason or are you just repeating what you've heard? — davegri, Commented Feb 7, 2016 at 11:08
You still haven't given me a good reason not to store a 16kb file in binary in a database. mongoose documents can be up to 16MB in size — davegri, Commented Feb 7, 2016 at 11:31
Typing from a phone was a pain, the reason is simple, performance penalties... admittedly 16kb is rather small for an image, but it's still quite large when in comparison to 16kb of text. Whenever you need to serve an image you need to first extract it from the data store, and then proceed to serve it to your user. Since they're thumbnails, you're going to be doing this tens of times on each request, each of those requests add up... Say you gathered the lot in one request, it's still a large transaction for a single (and simple) request. — Aydin, Commented Feb 7, 2016 at 11:34

Community · Accepted Answer · 2020-06-20 09:12:55Z

2

Okay here are my thoughts on this (I am not certain it will work though; some thoughts adopted from here).

I think you can achieve what you need using the Binary BSON type in pymongo library. Try loading the image in binary. Say using PILLOW (pil.image) or

image_file = open('1.bmp', 'rb')

or as

image_file = StringIO(open("test.jpg",'rb').read())

and then send it to Binary(image_file) type in pymongo

Binary_image_file = Binary(image_file) #pymongo libary

Then do a normal insert in mongo.

To read. do a normal find(). Then load the value from key and convert the data stored to image as:

image_data = StringIO.StringIO(Stringio_image_file)
image = Image.open(image_data)

I hope that helps a little. (also you could go with Aydin base64 proposition).

All the best.

CommunityBot

11 silver badge

answered Feb 7, 2016 at 18:34

ibininja

1,2171 gold badge15 silver badges29 bronze badges

thanks for that! complementing, using this answer to read the image worked better for me: stackoverflow.com/a/32908899/4877100
– Rodrigo Schneider
Commented Jul 30, 2019 at 10:34

Add a comment |

1 Answer 1