Include image in R packages

Question

I am trying to create a package for my company where there would be some custom color palettes and our company logo. I successfully built the package that contains all the required color palettes so far, however I am stuck when trying to include the logo as well.

I thought once the logo is loaded into R, it is just another data frame and I could simply use this function to store it:

logo <-  image_read("logo.png")
logo <- image_scale(logo, "50")    
usethis::use_data(logo,company_logo)

However, I encountered an error:

Error: Image pointer is dead. You cannot save or cache image objects between R sessions.

Now I am not sure if my objective would be possible?

Answer 1

You can install additional files in subdirectories under inst in your package. For example create a directory inst/logos in you package and put your logos there. When the package is installed this creates a directory logos in your package directory. Then you can use system.file to access the images when the package is installed. You could create a function in your package that does this for you. For example:

company_logo <- function() {
  magick::image_read(system.file("logos/logo.png", "MyCompanyPackage"))
}

The reason that storing the result of image_read using save doesn't work, is that the result returned by image_read is a pointer to some memory allocated by the package. When saving the result only the pointer is saved not the data pointed to.