Opening Images from URL using Pillow and urllib?

Question

This is my "Image Pasting" Program, which is designed to take one image (here named product) and paste it over another image (here named background). Before, I simply had the program get images from my computer. But I decided to add another feature where you can get them from a url. The computer part still works great.

from PIL import Image, ImageFilter
import urllib.request,io
print("ALL IMAGES MUST BE PNG FORMAT")
ext=input("Get Image From Computer or Internet?(c or i)")
if ext == "c":
    path = input("Background Image Path: ")
    fpath = input("Image Path: ")
if ext == "i":
    url = input("Background URL: ")
    furl = input("Image URL: ")
    path = io.StringIO(urllib.request.urlopen(url).read())
    fpath = io.StringIO(urllib.request.urlopen(furl).read())
background = Image.open(path)
product = Image.open(fpath)
x,y=background.size
x2,y2=product.size
xmid,ymid=x/2-(x2/2),y/2-(y2/2)
a=int(xmid)
b=int(ymid)
background.paste(product,(a,b),product)
background.show()
print(a,b)

When I run it:

ALL IMAGES MUST BE PNG FORMAT
Get Image From Computer or Internet?(c or i)i
Background URL: https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS6pIlao0o52_Sh2n_PLQ53jsI__QDgFxFOQK-WU-TFl0F3XtIm6Q
Image URL: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5s8rne3WJuQ/UPTjBcGoBPI/AAAAAAAAA0o/PPxdbY8ZvB4/s1600/44+baixar+download+the+amazing+spider+man+apk+gratis.png
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Users/William/Documents/Science/PYTHON/Image Pasting.py", line 12, in <module>
    path = io.StringIO(urllib.request.urlopen(url).read())
TypeError: initial_value must be str or None, not bytes

I took that part of the program from a Python 2 script, but tried to convert it, so I'm sure the error is in my notation.

Answer 1

Your TypeError should be enough to indicate that you're using the wrong IO class. Change:

path = io.StringIO(urllib.request.urlopen(url).read())
fpath = io.StringIO(urllib.request.urlopen(furl).read())

To

path = io.BytesIO(urllib.request.urlopen(url).read())
fpath = io.BytesIO(urllib.request.urlopen(furl).read())

And this should work for you.