What is the difference between import and load in Docker?

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docker save will indeed produce a tarball, but with all parent layers, and all tags + versions.

docker export does also produce a tarball, but without any layer/history.

It is often used when one wants to “flatten” an image, as illustrated in “Flatten a Docker container or image” from Thomas Uhrig:

docker export <CONTAINER ID> | docker import - some-image-name:latest

However, once those tarballs are produced, load/import are there to:

  • docker import creates one image from one tarball which is not even an image (just a filesystem you want to import as an image)

Create an empty filesystem image and import the contents of the
tarball

  • docker load creates potentially multiple images from a tarred repository (since docker save can save multiple images in a tarball).

Loads a tarred repository from a file or the standard input stream

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