How to check if a file is a valid image file?

Question

I have just found the builtin imghdr module. From python documentation:

The imghdr module determines the type of image contained in a file or byte stream.

This is how it works:

>>> import imghdr
>>> imghdr.what('/tmp/bass')
'gif'

Using a module is much better than reimplementing similar functionality

In addition to what Brian is suggesting you could use PIL's verify method to check if the file is broken.

im.verify()

Attempts to determine if the file is broken, without actually decoding the image data. If this method finds any problems, it raises suitable exceptions. This method only works on a newly opened image; if the image has already been loaded, the result is undefined. Also, if you need to load the image after using this method, you must reopen the image file. Attributes

Additionally to the PIL image check you can also add file name extension check like this:

filename.lower().endswith(('.png', '.jpg', '.jpeg', '.tiff', '.bmp', '.gif'))

Note that this only checks if the file name has a valid image extension, it does not actually open the image to see if it's a valid image, that's why you need to use additionally PIL or one of the libraries suggested in the other answers.

A lot of times the first couple chars will be a magic number for various file formats. You could check for this in addition to your exception checking above.

One option is to use the filetype package.

Installation

python -m pip install filetype

Advantages

1. Fast: Does its work by loading only the first few bytes of your image (check on the magic number)
2. Supports different mime type: Images, Videos, Fonts, Audio, Archives.

Example

filetype >= 1.0.7

import filetype

filename = "/path/to/file.jpg"

if filetype.is_image(filename):
    print(f"{filename} is a valid image...")
elif filetype.is_video(filename):
    print(f"{filename} is a valid video...")

filetype <= 1.0.6

import filetype

filename = "/path/to/file.jpg"

if filetype.image(filename):
    print(f"{filename} is a valid image...")
elif filetype.video(filename):
    print(f"{filename} is a valid video...")

Additional information on the official repo: https://github.com/h2non/filetype.py

Update

I also implemented the following solution in my Python script here on GitHub.

I also verified that damaged files (jpg) frequently are not 'broken' images i.e, a damaged picture file sometimes remains a legit picture file, the original image is lost or altered but you are still able to load it with no errors. But, file truncation cause always errors.

End Update

You can use Python Pillow(PIL) module, with most image formats, to check if a file is a valid and intact image file.

In the case you aim at detecting also broken images, @Nadia Alramli correctly suggests the im.verify() method, but this does not detect all the possible image defects, e.g., im.verify does not detect truncated images (that most viewers often load with a greyed area).

Pillow is able to detect these type of defects too, but you have to apply image manipulation or image decode/recode in or to trigger the check. Finally I suggest to use this code:

try:
  im = Image.load(filename)
  im.verify() #I perform also verify, don't know if he sees other types o defects
  im.close() #reload is necessary in my case
  im = Image.load(filename) 
  im.transpose(PIL.Image.FLIP_LEFT_RIGHT)
  im.close()
except: 
  #manage excetions here

In case of image defects this code will raise an exception. Please consider that im.verify is about 100 times faster than performing the image manipulation (and I think that flip is one of the cheaper transformations). With this code you are going to verify a set of images at about 10 MBytes/sec with standard Pillow or 40 MBytes/sec with Pillow-SIMD module (modern 2.5Ghz x86_64 CPU).

For the other formats psd,xcf,.. you can use Imagemagick wrapper Wand, the code is as follows:

im = wand.image.Image(filename=filename)
temp = im.flip;
im.close()

But, from my experiments Wand does not detect truncated images, I think it loads lacking parts as greyed area without prompting.

I red that Imagemagick has an external command identify that could make the job, but I have not found a way to invoke that function programmatically and I have not tested this route.

I suggest to always perform a preliminary check, check the filesize to not be zero (or very small), is a very cheap idea:

statfile = os.stat(filename)
filesize = statfile.st_size
if filesize == 0:
  #manage here the 'faulty image' case