How to write PNG image to string with the PIL?

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.

sth's solution didn't work for me
because in ...

Imaging/PIL/Image.pyc line 1423 -> raise KeyError(ext) # unknown extension

It was trying to detect the format from the extension in the filename , which doesn't exist in StringIO case

You can bypass the format detection by setting the format yourself in a parameter

import StringIO
output = StringIO.StringIO()
format = 'PNG' # or 'JPEG' or whatever you want
image.save(output, format)
contents = output.getvalue()
output.close()

For Python3 it is required to use BytesIO:

from io import BytesIO
from PIL import Image, ImageDraw

image = Image.new("RGB", (300, 50))
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(image)
draw.text((0, 0), "This text is drawn on image")

byte_io = BytesIO()

image.save(byte_io, 'PNG')

Read more: http://fadeit.dk/blog/post/python3-flask-pil-in-memory-image

save() can take a file-like object as well as a path, so you can use an in-memory buffer like a StringIO:

buf = StringIO.StringIO()
im.save(buf, format='JPEG')
jpeg = buf.getvalue()