When writing a groovy script to do a bulk images update in the data repository I realized that having the MgnlGroovyNode return an instance of the inputStream is not very much useful. You can't access, for example, file name, height, width and other attributes of that image. it is much more handy in this case to have the BinaryNodeData itself. It is also important that the javadoc for MgnlGroovyNode.getNodeDataValue(..) states clearly what kind of object is returned according to the underlying jcr type.