Development Status
- 5 - Production/Stable
Intended Audience
- Science/Research
- Education
- Developers
Operating System
- MacOS :: MacOS X
- Microsoft :: Windows
- POSIX
Programming Language
- Python :: 3
- Python :: 3.10
- Python :: 3.11
- Python :: 3.12
- Python :: 3.13
- Python :: 3.14
IMAGEIO
Website: https://imageio.readthedocs.io/
Imageio is a mature Python library that makes it easy to read and write image and video data. This includes animated images, video, volumetric data, and scientific formats. It is cross-platform, runs on Python 3.10+, and is easy to install.
Professional support is available via Tidelift.
Example
Here's a minimal example of how to use imageio. See the docs for more examples.
import imageio.v3 as iio
im = iio.imread('imageio:chelsea.png') # read a standard image
im.shape # im is a NumPy array of shape (300, 451, 3)
iio.imwrite('chelsea.jpg', im) # convert to jpg
API in a nutshell
You just have to remember a handful of functions:
imread() # for reading
imwrite() # for writing
imiter() # for iterating image series (animations/videos/OME-TIFF/...)
improps() # for standardized metadata
immeta() # for format-specific metadata
imopen() # for advanced usage
See the API docs for more information.
Features
- Simple interface via a concise set of functions
- Easy to install using Conda or pip
- Few core dependencies (only NumPy and Pillow)
- Pure Python, runs on Python 3.10+, and PyPy
- Cross platform, runs on Windows, Linux, macOS
- More than 295 supported formats
- Read/Write support for various resources (files, URLs, bytes, FileLike objects, ...)
- High code quality and large test suite including functional, regression, and integration tests
Dependencies
Minimal requirements:
- Python 3.10+
- NumPy
- Pillow >= 8.3.2
Optional Python packages:
- imageio-ffmpeg (for working with video files)
- pyav (for working with video files)
- tifffile (for working with TIFF files)
- itk or SimpleITK (for ITK plugin)
- astropy (for FITS plugin)
- imageio-flif (for working with FLIF image files)
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 adds sensible backend-specific defaults and then calls 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.
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.
