Reading png images into R

I'm trying to use some images within an R plot. I would like to feed the images directly into the R tool and leverage in a plot. The only way I've been able to get it to work is save all the images to a folder and read back into R using the readPNG function (png package). I've tried converting the images to binary but that did not work either. Is there another R package available that will allow me to read the Alteryx image format without having to save them to disk? Any examples of how to do this?

Thanks!

R Tool

Accepted answers

KaneG

Hi Landry,

The R tool can only read the data in via the connection as a list or as a dataframe. This limits your options to storing the PNG file as/in a dataframe and then converting it back using R code. Depending on what you are going to do with it as to whether this is actually a good idea. If you are planning to search the image looking for patterns then it may be practical to convert the image to binary, but in most cases saving it to disk or blob in a DB and then reading it back in using R script is going to be best (and by far and away easiest).

Kane

All comments

KaneG

Hi Landry,

Kane

landry_turner

Thanks, Kane!

My intent was to show profile pics within a hierarchy using igraph, so it can be up to 100 png images or more. I'll look into loading them as dataframe and converting, but if that doesn't work out I'll keep the approach I have to save to disk and read back in. Thanks!

rsillers

How do you convert the dataframe back to an image?

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