Fully load raster into a numpy array?

if you have python-gdal bindings:

import numpy as np
from osgeo import gdal
ds = gdal.Open("mypic.tif")
myarray = np.array(ds.GetRasterBand(1).ReadAsArray())

And you're done:

myarray.shape
(2610,4583)
myarray.size
11961630
myarray
array([[        nan,         nan,         nan, ...,  0.38068664,
     0.37952521,  0.14506227],
   [        nan,         nan,         nan, ...,  0.39791253,
            nan,         nan],
   [        nan,         nan,         nan, ...,         nan,
            nan,         nan],
   ..., 
   [ 0.33243281,  0.33221543,  0.33273876, ...,         nan,
            nan,         nan],
   [ 0.33308044,  0.3337177 ,  0.33416209, ...,         nan,
            nan,         nan],
   [ 0.09213851,  0.09242494,  0.09267616, ...,         nan,
            nan,         nan]], dtype=float32)

You can use rasterio to interface with NumPy arrays. To read a raster to an array:

import rasterio

with rasterio.open('/path/to/raster.tif', 'r') as ds:
    arr = ds.read()  # read all raster values

print(arr.shape)  # this is a 3D numpy array, with dimensions [band, row, col]

This will read everything into a 3D numpy array arr, with dimensions [band, row, col].

---

Here is an advanced example to read, edit a pixel, then save it back to the raster:

with rasterio.open('/path/to/raster.tif', 'r+') as ds:
    arr = ds.read()  # read all raster values
    arr[0, 10, 20] = 3  # change a pixel value on band 1, row 11, column 21
    ds.write(arr)

The raster will be written and closed at the end of the "with" statement.

Granted I'm reading a plain old png image, but this works using scipy (imsave uses PIL though):

>>> import scipy
>>> import numpy
>>> img = scipy.misc.imread("/home/chad/logo.png")
>>> img.shape
(81, 90, 4)
>>> array = numpy.array(img)
>>> len(array)
81
>>> scipy.misc.imsave('/home/chad/logo.png', array)

My resultant png is also 81 x 90 pixels.