Java converting an image to an input stream WITHOUT creating a file

Have you tried writing to a ByteArrayOutputStream and then creating a ByteArrayInputStream from that data to read from? (Call toArray on the ByteArrayOutputStream and then call the constructor of ByteArrayInputStream which will wrap that byte array.)

Typically you would use a ByteArrayOutputStream for that purpose. It acts as an in-memory stream.

ByteArrayOutputStream os = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
ImageIO.write(image,"png", os); 
InputStream fis = new ByteArrayInputStream(os.toByteArray());

Be careful using BytArray streams: if the image is large, that code will fail. i have not done much applet coding, but it's possible that the temp dir is available for writing (e.g. File.createTempFile() ).