how to load an image from url into buffer in nodejs

Question

I am new to nodejs and am trying to set up a server where i get the exif information from an image. My images are on S3 so I want to be able to just pass in the s3 url as a

Answer 1

I was able to solve this only after reading that encoding: null is required and providing it as an parameter to request.

This will download the image from url and produce a buffer with the image data.

Using the request library -

const request = require('request');

let url = 'http://website.com/image.png';
request({ url, encoding: null }, (err, resp, buffer) => {
     // Use the buffer
     // buffer contains the image data
     // typeof buffer === 'object'
});

Note: omitting the encoding: null will result in an unusable string and not in a buffer. Buffer.from won't work correctly too.

This was tested with Node 8