With the rapid development of electric power systems, load estimation plays an important role in system operation and planning. Usually, load estimation techniques contain traditional, time series, regression analysis-based, and machine learning-based estimation. Since the machine learning-based method can lead to better performance, in this paper, a deep learning-based load estimation algorithm using image fingerprint and attention mechanism is proposed. First, an image fingerprint construction is proposed for training data. After the data preprocessing, the training data matrix is constructed by the cyclic shift and cubic spline interpolation. Then, the linear mapping and the gray-color transformation method are proposed to form the color image fingerprint. Second, a convolutional neural network (CNN) combined with an attention mechanism is proposed for training performance improvement. At last, an experiment is carried out to evaluate the estimation performance. Compared with the support vector machine method, CNN method and long short-term memory method, the proposed algorithm has the best load estimation performance.