I have to store/retrieve a large number of images to use in my program.
Each image is small: an icon 50x50, and each one has associated a string which is the path the icon is related to.
Since they are so small I was thinking if there is some library which allows to store all of them in a single file. 
I would need to store both the image and the path string.
I don't know if pickle is a possible choice - I also heard about much more complicated libraries such as HDF5...
thanks for your help!
alessandro
You could pickle a dict that associates filenames to byte strings of RGBA data.
Assuming you have loaded the image with PIL, make sure they have all the same size and color format. Build a dict with images[filename] = im.tostring() and dump() it with pickle. Use Image.fromstring with the right size and mode parameters to get it back.
python: container to memorize a large number of images