Inputting (a lot of )data into a dataframe one row at a time I'm using python. Some 2D numpy arrays are stored in individual rows of a Series. They are 30x30 images. It looks something like this:

     pixels
0    [[23,4,54...],[54,6,7...],[........]]
1    [[65,54,255,55,...],[43,54,6...],[......]]
...
...
...
7000 [[........]]


For each row in the Series, I want to take these 2D arrays, flatten them to 1D, take the values and assign them to the columns of one row in data frame. Each row will have 30x30 = 900pixels each, storing the values of each pixel. Like this:

    pixel1    pixel2    pixel3...    pixel900
0       23         4        54             77
1       65        54       255             33
...
...
... 


I'm using an elaborate function that extracts one row from the series at a time, flattens the array, converts it to a Series again, and appends it to a dataframe. It takes sooo long. I'm sure there must be a faster way. I'm using this code:

def prep_pixels(X):
    # X is a series
    df = pd.DataFrame()
    for i in range(len(X.index)): #iterate through the whole series
        df = df.append(pd.Series(X[i].flatten()), ignore_index=True) 
    return df


EDIT:
Upon request from a user, I will provide code with how I ended up in this rut in the first place :D

#reading the files
filepath = 'dataset.pickle'
data_np = pd.read_pickle(filepath)
print(data_np[0])


Output:

 [array([[255, 248, 253, 255, 251, 253, 254, 236, 220, 217, 191, 145, 139,
        185, 216, 227, 252, 251, 254, 248, 251, 236, 221, 222, 213, 175,
        120,  75,  74, 209],
       [255, 253, 254, 253, 252, 254, 223, 146,  87,  75,  58,  30,  27,
         58,  86, 116, 157, 168, 164, 165, 167, 136,  96,  71,  59,  49,
         21,   9,  27, 144],
       [255, 255, 255, 248, 252, 255, 202,  88,  15,  16,  14,  11,  11,
         12,  12,  20,  40,  46,  38,  43,  40,  25,  21,  19,  17,  35,
         53,  58,  64, 124],
    ... 30 rows of 30 pixels
    ...
    ... last row coming up ...
    [255, 255, 254, 254, 253, 252, 253, 254, 255, 255, 254, 252, 249,
    249, 251, 213, 126, 178, 231, 252, 248, 250, 254, 254, 252, 253,
    255, 255, 255, 255]], dtype=uint8), 'क']


The last symbol in this list is the character that this image represents. It's the 'label'. It's supervised learning using CNNs. Anyway, I need them to be in the other format I described to be able to work with them. This is how I'm handling this data:

data = pd.DataFrame(data_np, columns=['pixels','labels'])
def prep_pixels(X):
    df = pd.DataFrame()
    for i in range(len(X.index)): #iterate through whole series
        df = df.append(pd.Series(X[i].ravel()), ignore_index=True)  
    return df

X = prep_pixels(data['pixels'])
y = data['labels']


EDIT: a user suggested that I use a mutable datatype to do this procedure. They said that it might speed things up because the computation does not need to make copies of data. I used some nested for loops and it cut the time to half (1 min 22 sec instead of 3 min). I still feel like its pathetic, given that my dataset has just 7000, 30x30 pixel images. Or, maybe I'm just new to data wrangling. 

Here is the code I used. Please let me know if you have any other suggestions:

filepath = 'dataset.pickle'
data_np = pd.read_pickle(filepath)

df = pd.DataFrame()
for row in range(IMG_ROW):   
    for col in range(IMG_COL):
        pixel=[]
        for img in range(len(data_np)):
            pixel.append(data_np[img][0][row][col]) 
        columns = pd.Series(pixel, name=col)
        df = pd.concat([df, columns], ignore_index=True, axis=1)
I'm getting timeit results of about 1/4 of the time using:

flatX = X.apply(lambda x: x.flatten())
pd.DataFrame(item for item in flatX)


See also 
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45901018/convert-pandas-series-of-lists-to-dataframe
for some possibly better options for the second line.

(Regarding my earlier comment, I don't get any real savings by just dataframe-ing at the end.)