podman-image-load

View documentation for the original command

$ tldr podman load

podman image load [options] [input]

--compression-type
    Compression algorithm: auto, gzip, bzip2, xz, zstd (default: auto)

--override-arch
    Override image architecture (e.g., amd64)

--override-os
    Override image OS (e.g., linux)

--quiet, -q
    Suppress progress output

--signature-policy
    Path to signature policy file for verification

--root
    Path to podman state root (default: /var/lib/containers)

--runroot
    Path to containers run directory (default: /run/containers)

--storage-driver
    Select storage driver (e.g., overlay)

--storage-opt
    Storage options as key=value

--url
    URL for Podman service (for remote mode)

The podman image load command imports one or more OCI or Docker-compatible container images from a tar archive into Podman's local image storage. It is the inverse of podman image save, enabling offline image transfer between systems without a registry. The archive can contain single or multiple images and layers, compressed with gzip, bzip2, xz, or zstd—compression is auto-detected by default.

Specify a file path as the argument, or omit it to read from stdin, useful for piping (e.g., cat image.tar | podman image load). Loaded images appear in podman images, tagged appropriately, and are ready for podman run, podman build, or other operations.

Key use cases include air-gapped environments, backing up images, sharing custom images via USB/SCP, or loading vendor-provided tarballs. It respects Podman's storage backend (e.g., overlay, vfs) and supports overrides for architecture/OS mismatches. Signature verification depends on the configured policy.

Loads images without inherent security checks unless a signature policy is specified; verify archive sources to avoid malicious images. Multi-platform images may require manifest overrides. Incompatible storage backends can fail silently.

podman image save --compress --output image.tar alpine
podman image load image.tar
cat image.tar | podman image load --quiet

Use --signature-policy with Sigstore/cosign policies for trusted loads in production.

Introduced in Podman v1.0 (2018) as part of libpod's image management, mirroring docker load. Evolved with containers/storage and containers/image libraries; v4+ added better compression/multi-arch support.

podman-image-save(1), podman-images(1), podman-pull(1), skopeo-copy(1)