Python Telegram Bot: How to transmit images from web URLs without local file storage

Other Questions Telegram bot
1

I’m building a telegram bot with Python and trying to send images that come from web URLs without downloading them to my computer first.

The normal way to send photos looks like this:

with open('my_picture.png', 'rb') as image_file:
    bot.send_photo(user_id, image_file)

But I want to send images directly from URLs like this:

import urllib2
image_data = urllib2.urlopen('https://example.com/sample.png')
bot.send_photo(user_id, image_data)

The issue is that urllib2.urlopen() gives me a different type of object than what I get from open(). When I try to use the URL object directly, I get a “414 Request-URI Too Large” error.

I also tried using .read() on the URL object but that creates the same problem.

Is there a way to convert the web URL data into the right format for sending through the bot? I really want to avoid saving files to disk if possible.

2

btw urllib2 is python 2 stuff, if ur using python 3 switch to requests library instead. way cleaner and handles this better:

import requests
from io import BytesIO

r = requests.get('https://example.com/sample.png')
bot.send_photo(user_id, BytesIO(r.content))

requests is way more reliable for this

3

That 414 error means the bot API is trying to use the URL string instead of the actual image data. You need to handle the response object from your URL request properly. I’ve run into this before - just use .read() on your urllib2 response and wrap it in a BytesIO object. The bot API can process it correctly that way:

import urllib2
from io import BytesIO

response = urllib2.urlopen('https://example.com/sample.png')
image_bytes = BytesIO(response.read())
bot.send_photo(user_id, image_bytes)

This creates a file-like object in memory (same as using open()) that works with the bot API without saving anything to disk.

4

You can also just pass the URL straight to send_photo - most telegram bot libraries handle this natively. Skip downloading the image yourself and pass the URL string directly:

bot.send_photo(user_id, 'https://example.com/sample.png')

This way Telegram’s servers fetch the image from the URL, which is usually more efficient than processing it through your bot. Works great with python-telegram-bot library. Just make sure the URL is publicly accessible and points directly to an image file, not a webpage with an image.