How to get image bytes?

📊 Plotly Python
1

How to get png image bytes directly from Figure. Without saving the image locally or on the website.

2

Hi there,

What you can do is take your fig which is essentially a dictionary of all your data, then…

  • execute image_hex = py.image.get(fig, format='png', height=fig['layout']['height'], width=fig['layout']['width'])
    which uses py.image.get() to return the string of the png

-next make sure you import sys and execute sys.getsizeof(image_hex) which should give you the byte count

I tested this with a small scatterplot image which gave me a byte count of 4023, whereas clicking get info on the downloaded image gave me 4150, but the difference looks statistically insignificant.

3

Thanks! this is what I needed. But why does it still call the API? I don’t store anything on Plotly’s cloud. Is there a way to do the same thing with plotly.offline?

4

I believe the short answer to that is that you are still making a GET request, which is one of the ways you can interact with the server. It still counts for something, as does a POST request, which is more the bread and butter type of request.

Yes you can use py.image.get() in offline mode. I just tried it and it works.

Sorry for the late reply as well. Hope all this helps.