How to load an image from memory in Kivy

Sometime you may have the need to load an image already in memory instead of use one of the several ways Kivy provides to load images.

I had this need for a project of mine so I came up with the following code (I was inspired by this thread).

#!/usr/bin/env python
# encoding: utf-8

# kivy_memory_image.py
# How to load an image from memory in Kivy
# http://mornie.org/blog/2013/11/06/how-load-image-memory-kivy/

# Copyright (c) 2013, Daniele Tricoli 
# All rights reserved.
#
# License: BSD-3

import StringIO

from matplotlib.backends.backend_agg import FigureCanvasAgg
from matplotlib.figure import Figure
import numpy as np

from kivy.app import App
from kivy.core.image.img_pygame import ImageLoaderPygame
from kivy.properties import ObjectProperty
from kivy.uix.image import Image


def cardioid(start, stop, step):
    """A rotated cardioid."""
    theta = np.arange(start, stop, step)
    r = 1 - np.sin(theta)
    return theta, r


def polar_plot(theta, r, rmax):
    """Draw a polat plot.

    :returns: matplotlib.Figure
    """
    fig = Figure(facecolor='white')
    ax = fig.add_subplot(111, polar=True, frameon=False)
    ax.grid(False)
    ax.set_xticklabels([])
    ax.set_yticklabels([])
    ax.plot(theta, r, color='g', linewidth=2)
    ax.set_rmax(rmax)
    return fig


def fig2png(fig):
    """Convert a matplotlib.Figure to PNG image.

    :returns: PNG image bytes
    """
    data = StringIO.StringIO()
    canvas = FigureCanvasAgg(fig)
    canvas.print_png(data)
    return data.getvalue()


class MemoryImage(Image):
    """Display an image already loaded in memory."""
    memory_data = ObjectProperty(None)

    def __init__(self, memory_data, **kwargs):
        super(MemoryImage, self).__init__(**kwargs)

        self.memory_data = memory_data

    def on_memory_data(self, *args):
        """Load image from memory."""
        data = StringIO.StringIO(self.memory_data)
        with self.canvas:
            self.texture = ImageLoaderPygame(data).texture


class TestApp(App):

    def build(self):
        return MemoryImage(self.options['image'])

if __name__ == '__main__':

    theta, r = cardioid(0, 8.0, 0.01)
    image = fig2png(polar_plot(theta, r, 2.5))
    TestApp(image=image).run()

cardioid, polar_plot and fig2png are simply support functions to simulate an image already loaded in memory. My actual use case is different: I have images as BLOB inside a SQLite database (just like I described years ago). The real work is done by MemoryImage’s on_memory_data method, taking advantage of Kivy automatic property binding.

You can download the whole example from here: kivy_memory_image.py.

mornie.org

How to load an image from memory in Kivy

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