imgfs

imgfs

imgfs lets you mount an image as a FUSE userspace file system. It uses bazil.org/fuse, a pure-Go implementation of FUSE, and is heavily based on zipfs.

Usage

Install with Go:

go install github.com/bewuethr/imgfs@latest

Create a directory as the mount target, and then mount an image file:

mkdir mnt
imgfs image.png mnt &

Supported image formats are PNG, JPEG, GIF, and WebP.

Navigate the directory tree representing the image; in the root directory, directories represent rows of pixels:

$ tree -L 1 mnt
mnt
├── row0
├── row1
└── row2

Within a pixel row, directories correspond to pixels ("columns"):

$ tree -L 1 mnt/row0
mnt/row0
├── col0
├── col1
└── col2

And within a pixel directory, there are files containing RGB values of the pixel:

$ tree -L 1 mnt/row0/col0
mnt/row0/col0
├── b
├── g
└── r

Individual values are scaled to 0..255:

$ head mnt/row0/col0/*
==> mnt/row0/col0/b <==
0

==> mnt/row0/col0/g <==
0

==> mnt/row0/col0/r <==
255

So the pixel at (0,0) has RGB values of (255,0,0), i.e., is full red.

To stop and unmount, first kill the job, then unmount:

kill %1
fusermount -u mnt   # Linux
umount mnt          # macOS

Limitations

• The file system is read-only
• Probably a bunch of bugs