The general idea is that a File would yield a FileInputStream and a byte[] a ByteArrayInputStream. Both implement InputStream so they should be compatible with any method that uses InputStream as a parameter.

Methods should generally accept InputStream rather than any implementing classes such as ByteArrayInputStream for reading bytes otherwise the whole generalization / raison d'être of byte streams is lost.

Putting all of the file contents in a ByteArrayInputStream can be done of course:

1. read in the full file into a byte[]; Java version >= 7 contains a convenience method called readAllBytes to read all data from a file;
2. create a ByteArrayInputStream around the file content, which is now in memory.

Note that this may not be optimal solution for very large files - all the file will stored in memory at the same point in time. Using the right stream for the job is important.

InputStream in = //your ByteArrayInputStream here
OutputStream out = new FileOutputStream("filename.jpg");

// Transfer bytes from in to out
byte[] buf = new byte[1024];
int len;
while ((len = in.read(buf)) > 0) {
    out.write(buf, 0, len);
}
in.close();
out.close();

Without any libraries:

try (FileOutputStream stream = new FileOutputStream(path)) {
    stream.write(bytes);
}

With Google Guava:

Files.write(bytes, new File(path));

With Apache Commons:

FileUtils.writeByteArrayToFile(new File(path), bytes);

All of these strategies require that you catch an IOException at some point too.

You need to read each byte from your InputStream and write it to a ByteArrayOutputStream.

You can then retrieve the underlying byte array by calling toByteArray():

InputStream is = ...
ByteArrayOutputStream buffer = new ByteArrayOutputStream();

int nRead;
byte[] data = new byte[16384];

while ((nRead = is.read(data, 0, data.length)) != -1) {
  buffer.write(data, 0, nRead);
}

return buffer.toByteArray();

I'm assuming you mean that 'use' means read, but what i'll explain for the read case can be basically reversed for the write case.

so you end up with a byte[]. this could represent any kind of data which may need special types of conversions (character, encrypted, etc). let's pretend you want to write this data as is to a file.

firstly you could create a ByteArrayInputStream which is basically a mechanism to supply the bytes to something in sequence.

then you could create a FileOutputStream for the file you want to create. there are many types of InputStreams and OutputStreams for different data sources and destinations.

lastly you would write the InputStream to the OutputStream. in this case, the array of bytes would be sent in sequence to the FileOutputStream for writing. For this i recommend using IOUtils

byte[] bytes = ...;//
ByteArrayInputStream in = new ByteArrayInputStream(bytes);
FileOutputStream out = new FileOutputStream(new File(...));
IOUtils.copy(in, out);
IOUtils.closeQuietly(in);
IOUtils.closeQuietly(out);

and in reverse

FileInputStream in = new FileInputStream(new File(...));
ByteArrayOutputStream out = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
IOUtils.copy(in, out);
IOUtils.closeQuietly(in);
IOUtils.closeQuietly(out);
byte[] bytes = out.toByteArray();

if you use the above code snippets you'll need to handle exceptions and i recommend you do the 'closes' in a finally block.