Styjun

imread is deprecated in SciPy 1.0.0, and will be removed in 1.2.0.
Use imageio.imread instead.

import imageio
im = imageio.imread('astronaut.png')
im.shape # im is a numpy array
(512, 512, 3)
imageio.imwrite('imageio:astronaut-gray.jpg', im[:, :, 0])

You need the Python Imaging Library (PIL) but alas! the PIL project seems to have been abandoned. In particular, it hasn't been ported to Python 3. So if you want PIL functionality in Python 3, you'll do well do use Pillow, which is the semi-official fork of PIL and appears to be actively developed. Actually, if you need a modern PIL implementation at all I'd recommend Pillow. It's as simple as pip install pillow. As it uses the same namespace as PIL it's essentially a drop-in replacement.

How "semi-official" is this fork? you may ask. The About page of the Pillow docs say this:

As more time passes since the last PIL release, the likelihood of a
new PIL release decreases. However, we’ve yet to hear an official “PIL
is dead” announcement. So if you still want to support PIL, please
report issues here first, then open corresponding Pillow tickets here.

Please provide a link to the first ticket so we can track the issue(s)
upstream.

However, the most recent PIL release on the official PIL site is dated November 15, 2009. I think we can safely proclaim Pillow as the successor of PIL after (as of this writing) nearly eight years of no new releases. So even if you don't need Python 3 support, I suggest you eschew the ancient PIL 1.1.6 distribution available in PyPI and just install fresh, up-to-date, compatible Pillow.

For Python 3, it is best to use imread in matplotlib.pyplot:

from matplotlib.pyplot import imread

imread is depreciated after version 1.2.0!
So to solve this issue I had to install version 1.1.0.

pip install scipy==1.1.0

Install the Pillow library by following commands:

pip install pillow

Note, the selected answer has been outdated. See the docs of
SciPy

Note that Pillow (https://python-pillow.org/) is not a dependency of SciPy, but the image manipulation functions indicated in the list below are not available without it.

Imread uses PIL library, if the library is installed use :
"from scipy.ndimage import imread"

Source: http://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy-0.17.0/reference/generated/scipy.ndimage.imread.html

python -m pip install pillow

This worked for me.

As answered misc.imread is deprecated in SciPy 1.0.0, and will be removed in 1.2.0.
imageio is one option,it will return object of type :

<class 'imageio.core.util.Image'>

but instead of imageio, use cv2

import cv2
im = cv2.imread('astronaut.png')

im will be of type :
<class 'numpy.ndarray'>

As numpy arrays are faster to compute.

You need a python image library (PIL), but now PIL only is not enough, you'd better install Pillow. This works well.

Running the following in a Jupyter Notebook, I had a similar error message:

from skimage import data
photo_data = misc.imread('C:/Users/ers.jpg')
type(photo_data)

'error' msg:

D:Program Files (x86)Microsoft Visual
StudioSharedAnaconda3_64libsite-packagesipykernel_launcher.py:3:
DeprecationWarning: imread is deprecated! imread is deprecated in
SciPy 1.0.0, and will be removed in 1.2.0. Use imageio.imread
instead. This is separate from the ipykernel package so we can avoid
doing imports until

And using the following I got it solved:

import matplotlib.pyplot
photo_data = matplotlib.pyplot.imread('C:/Users/ers.jpg')
type(photo_data)

I have all the packages required for the image extraction on jupyter notebook, but even then it shows me the same error.

Error on Jupyter Notebook

Reading the above comments, I have installed the required packages. Please do tell if I have missed some packages.

pip3 freeze | grep -i -E "pillow|scipy|scikit-image"
Pillow==5.4.1
scikit-image==0.14.2

scipy==1.2.1

The solution that work for me in python 3.6 is the following

py -m pip install Pillow