GridFS is an implementation of a file system in the DB. So one is likely to do similar things to the files as with a conventional file system. Unfortunately the GridOut objects returned by pymongo when accessing a file are missing some crucial file-like object features. If an object is properly file-like, many operations can be handled in a much more efficient way, without having to do them in custom code "yourself". These things could be for example serving the file out in a WSGI web application using the wsgi.file_wrapper, using the handle with a context manager (the "with" statement), passing the object around to other modules/functions to do operations straight away like opening an image, ...

Methods that I've so far stumbled over which seem to be missing particularly are these:

• close()
• fileno()

This offers a more comprehensive overview in the Python documentation on flie and file-like objects:

http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#file-objects

A change for this would not break anything backwards, as only additional methods would be offered.