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

Use the request library.

request('<s3imageurl>', function(err, response, buffer) {
    // Do something
});

Also, node-image-headers might be of interest to you. It sounds like it takes a stream, so it might not even have to download the full image from S3 in order to process the headers.

Updated with correct callback signature.

Answer 2

Try setting up request like this:

var request = require('request').defaults({ encoding: null });
request.get(s3Url, function (err, res, body) {
      //process exif here
});

Setting encoding to null will cause request to output a buffer instead of a string.

Answer 3

Use the axios:

const response = await axios.get(url,  { responseType: 'arraybuffer' })
const buffer = Buffer.from(response.data, "utf-8")

Answer 4

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

Answer 5

request is deprecated and should be avoided if possible.

Good alternatives include got (only for node.js) and axios (which also support browsers).

Example of got:

npm install got

Using the async/await syntax:

const got = require('got');

const url = 'https://www.google.com/images/branding/googlelogo/2x/googlelogo_color_272x92dp.png';

(async () => {
    try {
        const response = await got(url, { responseType: 'buffer' });
        const buffer = response.body;
    } catch (error) {
        console.log(error.body);
    }
})();