Cropping an image from URL to InputStream

Question

I need to crop an image from the web (via its url) and return an InputStream (which can be uploaded to AWS S3). I am using org.imgscalr as the library and have the following method:

public InputStream cropFile(String url) throws Exception, IOException {

        BufferedImage original = ImageIO.read(new URL(url));
        BufferedImage target = null;
        // resize based on http://www.htmlgoodies.com/beyond/java/create-high-quality-thumbnails-using-the-imgscalr-library.html
        target = Scalr.crop(original, 410, 60, 200, 300, Scalr.OP_ANTIALIAS);
        InputStream is = (InputStream) ImageIO.createImageInputStream(target);
        Assert.assertNotNull(is);// it always returns null!!!
        return is;
    }

I call the method with something like:

InputStream is = cropFile("http://fengyuanchen.github.io/cropperjs/img/picture.jpg");

and then try to upload it to AWS S3:

PutObjectRequest request = new PutObjectRequest(AWSConfig.getBucket(), key, is, meta);
s3.putObject(request);

Unfortunately, I keep getting a null input stream (at the assert point above). If I change the createImage to:

ImageIO.write(target, "jpg", new File("c:\\dest.jpg"));

Then a proper image is written (so it works).