[Image-SIG] fastest jpeg conversion possible

[David Ascher]

I'm finding that 

  data = Image.open('bigfile.jpeg').tostring()

is a little slow, on large images.  Now, part of that is because it's a
big job.  I'm wondering if taking PIL out of the loop and writing a module
which just did the jpeg decode based on libjpeg would significantly reduce
the time (and/or temporary memory usage -- which impacts time on
memory-starved machines) of that operation.  I haven't looked enough at
the internals to know whether PIL is doing this efficiently or not.

Anyone have any ideas?

--david