Java- Convert bufferedimage to byte[] without writing to disk

Question

I'm trying to send multiple images over a socket using java but I need a faster way to convert the images to a byte array so I can send them. I tried the following code but it wrote about 10,000 images to my C:\ drive. Is there a way to make this conversion without writing to disk? Thanks!

ByteArrayOutputStream outputStream = new ByteArrayOutputStream();                      //ImageIO.setUseCache(false);                     ImageIO.write(bi.getImage(), "jpg", outputStream);                      byte[] imageBytes = outputStream.toByteArray(); 

Answer 1

This should work:

byte[] imageBytes = ((DataBufferByte) bufferedImage.getData().getDataBuffer()).getData();