How to send an PIL Image via telegram bot without saving it to a file

Question

For my telegram bot (python-telegram-bot) i generated a PIL.Image.Image and i want to send it directly to a user.

What works is to send an image as bufferedReader from a file, but i don't want to safe the image. I don't need it again afterwards and i might generate a lot of different images at the same time, so saving is kind of messy.

bot.send_photo(chat_id=update.message.chat_id,
               photo=open(img_dir, 'rb'),
               caption='test',
               parse_mode=ParseMode.MARKDOWN)

Because i generated it myself, i cant use an URL or file_id. I thought it might be possible to convert the image to a bufferedReader, but i only managed to get a bytes object from it, which didn't work.

The image is generated like:

images = [Image.open(i) for i in dir_list]
widths, heights = zip(*(i.size for i in images))
total_width = sum(widths)
max_height = max(heights)
new_im = Image.new('RGBA', (total_width, max_height))

x_offset = 0
for im in images:
    new_im.paste(im, (x_offset, 0))
    x_offset += im.size[0]
return new_im                 # returns a PIL.Image.Image

Thanks in advance :) merry x-mas

Answer 1

Have a lock at this code snippet from the packages github wiki

Post an image from memory

In this example, image is a PIL (or Pillow) Image object, but it works the same with all media types.

from io import BytesIO
bio = BytesIO()
bio.name = 'image.jpeg'
image.save(bio, 'JPEG')
bio.seek(0)
bot.send_photo(chat_id, photo=bio)

Answer 2

Don't know if you interesting in sending animated GIF, but this code snippet should help to those who will:

from telegram import Update, ForceReply
from telegram.ext import Updater, CommandHandler, MessageHandler, Filters, CallbackContext

def echo_gif(update: Update, context: CallbackContext) -> None:
    """ Echo to /gif command """
    
    context.bot.sendAnimation(chat_id=update.message.chat_id,
               animation=open("URuEc5hnbNIGs.gif", 'rb').read(), ## some local file name
               caption='That is your gif!',
               )
    return    

def main() -> None:
    """Start the bot."""
    # Create the Updater and pass it your bot's token.
    updater = Updater(TOKEN)

    # Get the dispatcher to register handlers
    dispatcher = updater.dispatcher

    # on different commands - answer in Telegram
    dispatcher.add_handler(CommandHandler("gif", echo_gif))
    # Start the Bot
    updater.start_polling()

    # Run the bot until you press Ctrl-C or the process receives SIGINT,
    # SIGTERM or SIGABRT. This should be used most of the time, since
    # start_polling() is non-blocking and will stop the bot gracefully.
    updater.idle()