I've always used this to load an image from a tar
docker load < image.tar
is same as:
docker load --input image.tar
Useful when I had to run something like:
cat docker-cache/docker-tags.txt | xargs -t -I % docker load < docker-cache/images/%
That fails because loading the file into stdin gets evaluated first before the value from xargs.
cat docker-cache/docker-tags.txt | xargs -t -I % docker load --input docker-cache/images/%