Input/Output with Mahotas

Mahotas does not have any builtin support for input/output. However, it wraps a few other libraries that do. The result is that you can do:

import mahotas as mh
image = mh.imread('file.png')
mh.imwrite('copy.png', image)

It can use the following backends (it tries them in the following order):

1. It prefers imread, if it is available. Imread is a native C++ library which reads images into Numpy arrays. It supports PNG, JPEG, TIFF, WEBP, BMP, and a few TIFF-based microscopy formats (LSM and STK).
2. It also looks for freeimage. Freeimage can read and write many formats. Unfortunately, it is harder to install and it is not as well-maintained as imread.
3. As a final fallback, it tries to use matplotlib, which has builtin PNG support and wraps PIL for other formats.