Alamofire error Code=-1000 "The URL does not point to a file URL"

Question

Having issues uploading images to my server from the iOS application I'm developing. I'm using Alamofire, and a UIImagePickerController.

Inside the didFinishPickingMediaWithInfo delegate method I'm saving the file the user selects as a NSURL from info[UIImagePickerControllerReferenceURL] in a variable named self.imageNSURL.

Passing this along to Alamofires upload multipartFormData method as such (pretty much a standard copy and paste from their docs)

Alamofire.upload(
    .POST,
    URLString: "http://app.staging.acme.com/api/users/\(id)/picture",
    multipartFormData: { multipartFormData in
        multipartFormData.appendBodyPart(fileURL: self.imageNSURL, name: "image")
    },
    encodingCompletion: { encodingResult in
        switch encodingResult {
        case .Success(let upload, _, _):
            upload.responseJSON { request, response, JSON, error in
                println(JSON)
            }
        case .Failure(let encodingError):
            println(encodingError)
        }
    }
)   

The error in return I am getting is

Error Domain=com.alamofire.error Code=-1000 "The operation couldn’t be completed. The URL does not point to a file URL: assets-library://asset/asset.JPG?id=00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000&ext=JPG" UserInfo=0x00000000000 {NSLocalizedFailureReason=The URL does not point to a file URL: assets-library://asset/asset.JPG?id=00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000&ext=JPG}

Please note, I've nerfed the ID's in the response for this post, the actual error message contains valid ones.

Answer 1

Well this is due to the URL returned from info[UIImagePickerControllerReferenceURL] this URL points to assets-library/asset, this due to sandboxing. So you cannot access the file using this URL thats why alamofire complains that your URL is not a file URL. To solve this problem you can use multipartFormData.appendBodyPart(data: data, name: name) this method takes the data to be sent directly as NSData. Full code example:

let imagePicked = info[UIImagePickerControllerOriginalImage]
let imageExtenstion = info[UIImagePickerControllerReferenceURL]
// imageExtenstion will be "asset.JPG"/"asset.JPEG"/"asset.PNG"
// so we have to remove the asset. part
var imagePickedData : NSData
switch imageExtenstion {
    case "PNG": imagePickedData = UIImagePNGRepresentation(imagePicked)!
   // compressionQuality is a float between 0.0 and 1.0 with 0.0 being most compressed with lower quality and 1.0 least compressed with higher quality
    case "JPG", "JPEG": imagePickedData = UIImageJPEGRepresentation(image, compressionQuality)!
}
Alamofire.upload(.POST, YOUR_URL, multipartFormData: { multipartFormData in 
     multipartFormData.appendBodyPart(data: imagePickedData, name: imageName)
 }, encodingCompletion: { encodingResult in
    switch encodingResult {
    case .Success(let upload, _, _):
        upload.responseJSON { request, response, JSON, error in
            print(JSON)
        }
    case .Failure(let encodingError):
        print(encodingError)
    }
})