CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonpython-3.xpython-imaging-library
fusilli.jerry89
fusilli.jerry89

Reputation: 319

UnicodeDecodeError using PIL module

I am getting this error message:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: invalid start byte

From this code:

from PIL import Image
import os

image_name = "mypic"
count = 0

for filename in os.listdir('pictures'):
    if filename.endswith('.jpg'):
        image_file = open('pictures/' +filename)
        image = Image.open(image_file)

        # next 3 lines strip exif
        data = list(image.getdata())
        image_without_exif = Image.new(image.mode, image.size)
        image_without_exif.putdata(data)

        image_without_exif.save('new-pictures/' + image_name + str(count) + '.jpg')
        count = count + 1;

Not sure why, as this was working yesterday...

Upvotes: 5

Views: 4497

Answers (3)

ti7
ti7

Reputation: 18796

This happens because open is trying to read the file as text. You can resolve this by opening the path directly with Image.open()

img = Image.open('pictures/' + filename)

This works because PIL does the related handling for you internally; take a look at its documentation here for more!
https://pillow.readthedocs.io/en/latest/reference/Image.html#PIL.Image.open

Further, it probably makes even more sense to use Image.open as a context manager to handle opening and closing your image when done (there's a good explanation here)

with Image.open('pictures/' + filename) as img:
    # process img
# image file closed now after leaving context scope

Upvotes: 3

Azsgy
Azsgy

Reputation: 3307

When using the open(filename) function without any further arguments, you open the file in "text" mode.

Python will assume that the file contains text when reading it. When it finds a byte with the value of 255 (0xFF), it is confused because no text character matches that byte.

To fix this, open the file in bytes mode:

open(filename, "b")

This tells python to not assume it contains text and the file handle will just give out the raw bytes instead.

Because this is a common use-case, PIL already has opening images by filename built in:

Image.open(filename)

Upvotes: 0

Sam Comber
Sam Comber

Reputation: 1293

I think you need to open the file in binary mode:

image_file = open('pictures/' +filename, 'rb')

Upvotes: 3

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