scipy.misc module has no attribute imread?

imread is deprecated in SciPy 1.0.0, and will be removed in 1.2.0. Use imageio.imread instead.

import imageio
im = imageio.imread('astronaut.png')
im.shape  # im is a numpy array
(512, 512, 3)
imageio.imwrite('imageio:astronaut-gray.jpg', im[:, :, 0])

You need to install Pillow (formerly PIL). From the docs on scipy.misc:

Note that Pillow is not a dependency of SciPy but the image manipulation functions indicated in the list below are not available without it:

...

imread

...

After installing Pillow, I was able to access imread as follows:

In [1]: import scipy.misc

In [2]: scipy.misc.imread
Out[2]: <function scipy.misc.pilutil.imread>

imread is depreciated after version 1.2.0! So to solve this issue I had to install version 1.1.0.

pip install scipy==1.1.0

For Python 3, it is best to use imread in matplotlib.pyplot:

from matplotlib.pyplot import imread