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I am running this code to compare the similarity of two profile images belonging to two different social networks, i am first downloading the images from the two websites,and then for each user,i give the local images paths to two variables, i wonder if there is any alternative that allow me to manipulate those images online instead of downloading them, ie: giving the code image's URL instead of local path (i don't want to download the images on my local machine, cause it will take too much space when dealing with millions of them)

from PIL import Image
import imagehash
hash0 = imagehash.average_hash(Image.open('quora_photo.jpg')) 
hash1 = imagehash.average_hash(Image.open('twitter_photo.jpeg')) 
cutoff = 5

if hash0 - hash1 < cutoff:
    print('images are similar')
else:
    print('images are not similar')
Youcef
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1 Answers1

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Every time you see an image on your browser your machine has downloaded it before. It is not possible to manipulate an image without downloading it.

Take a look at tempfile module, you may create temporary files to be sure that they will be deleted in the future. Or delete the files after you manipulate them as @ArnavBorborah said

EDIT :

Take a look at this method urllib.request.urlretrieve

You can adapt their example : 

import urllib.request
local_filename, headers = urllib.request.urlretrieve(<image_url>)
with open(local_filename) as image:
    #do stuff

The second argument, if present, specifies the file location to copy to (if absent, the location will be a tempfile with a generated name).

If you do not specify the filename argument, urllib will create a temporary file

Corentin Limier
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  • since it is downloaded on my browser, can i use selenium to manipulate the current browser visited website's images URLs in order to process them ? – Youcef Oct 10 '18 at 16:26
  • @Youcef I don't know about selenium, but maybe urllib will help you, I edited my message – Corentin Limier Oct 10 '18 at 16:53