In this blog post, we will explore how to use the Imageio library in Python to save image sequences. Imageio is a powerful library that allows us to read and write a wide variety of image formats. Saving image sequences is often required in computer vision, image processing, and machine learning applications.

Installation

Before we get started, let’s make sure we have Imageio installed. You can install it using pip by running the following command:

pip install imageio

Saving an Image Sequence

Let’s begin by writing a Python script that saves a sequence of images as an image sequence file. We will assume that you already have a list of image frames stored in variable images.

import imageio

# Specify the path and filename pattern for the output image sequence
output_path = "path/to/output/folder/"
filename_pattern = "frame_{:04d}.png"

# Save each image frame in the sequence
for i, image in enumerate(images):
    # Use the filename pattern and frame number to generate the filename
    filename = filename_pattern.format(i)
    # Save the image using Imageio
    imageio.imwrite(output_path + filename, image)

In the above code snippet, we iterate over each image frame in the images list. We use the filename_pattern to generate the output filename that includes the frame number. Finally, we save each image frame using the imwrite function from the Imageio library.

Note that you can customize the filename_pattern to suit your needs. In the example above, we used the format frame_{:04d}.png, which will create filenames in the format frame_0000.png, frame_0001.png, and so on.

Supported Image Formats

One of the advantages of using Imageio is its ability to read and write a wide range of image formats, including popular formats like PNG, JPEG, GIF, and TIFF. You can easily adapt the code in the previous section to save image sequences in different formats by changing the extension of the output filename.

filename_pattern = "frame_{:04d}.jpg"  # save as JPEG
filename_pattern = "frame_{:04d}.gif"  # save as GIF
filename_pattern = "frame_{:04d}.tiff" # save as TIFF

Conclusion

In this blog post, we explored how to use the Imageio library in Python to save image sequences. We learned how to specify a path and filename pattern for the output, as well as how to save a sequence of images using the imwrite function. We also mentioned the wide range of supported image formats that Imageio provides.

With Imageio, saving image sequences in Python becomes a straightforward task, allowing you to easily process and analyze sequential image data in your projects. Give it a try and see how it can enhance your image-based applications!