What did you do?

image = Image.open(image_filepath)

while using PyTorch data loader with 8 workers.

What did you expect to happen?

Fast

What actually happened?

Slow

What are your OS, Python and Pillow versions?

• OS: Linux
• Python: 3.10.13
• Pillow: 10.2.0

Reading PNG images with Pillow is faster.

For me, current workaround is to use https://github.com/kodonnell/qoi from PyPI (qoi package). It is faster when I switched to it. To compare:

image = qoi.read(image_filepath)

Image sizes are regular, like 800x480, 1280x600.