how to load an image from url into buffer in nodejs

Question

I am new to nodejs and am trying to set up a server where i get the exif information from an image. My images are on S3 so I want to be able to just pass in the s3 url as a parameter and grab the image from it.

I am u using the ExifImage project below to get the exif info and according to their documentation:

"Instead of providing a filename of an image in your filesystem you can also pass a Buffer to ExifImage."

How can I load an image to the buffer in node from a url so I can pass it to the ExifImage function

ExifImage Project: https://github.com/gomfunkel/node-exif

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

Try setting up request like this:

var request = require('request').defaults({ encoding: null }); request.get(s3Url, function (err, res, body) {       //process exif here }); 

Setting encoding to null will cause request to output a buffer instead of a string.

Answer 2

Use the axios:

const response = await axios.get(url,  { responseType: 'arraybuffer' }) const buffer = Buffer.from(response.data, "utf-8")