How do I read image data from a URL in Python?

What I’m trying to do is fairly simple when we’re dealing with a local file, but the problem comes when I try to do this with a remote URL.

Basically, I’m trying to create a PIL image object from a file pulled from a URL. Sure, I could always just fetch the URL and store it in a temp file, then open it into an image object, but that feels very inefficient.

Here’s what I have:

Image.open(urlopen(url))

It flakes out complaining that seek() isn’t available, so then I tried this:

Image.open(urlopen(url).read())

But that didn’t work either. Is there a Better Way to do this, or is writing to a temporary file the accepted way of doing this sort of thing?

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