Encode Base64 Django ImageField Stream

Question

I receive an Image through my form, which I not want to save as usual in a FileField but in a CharField as Base64. This is my current setup:

models.py

class Image(models.Model):
    company = models.ForeignKey(Company)

    img = models.TextField()

    img_id = models.CharField(blank=True, null=True, max_length=64)
    img_class = models.CharField(blank=True, null=True, max_length=64)

    created = models.DateField(auto_now_add=True, editable=False)

forms.py

class ImageForm(forms.Form):
    img = forms.ImageField()
    img_id = forms.CharField(required=False)
    img_class = forms.CharField(required=False)

views.py

class ImageUploadView(LoginRequiredMixin, FormView):
    form_class = ImageForm
    template_name = "upload.html"
    success_url = reverse_lazy("home")

    def form_valid(self, form):
        account = Account.objects.get(user=self.request.user)
        html = Html.objects.get(company=account.company)

        if self.request.user.is_authenticated():
            company = Company.objects.get(account=account)

            form_img = form.cleaned_data['img']

            print(form_img.__dict__.keys())
            print(form_img.image)

        return super(ImageUploadView, self).form_valid(form)

The output of print(form_img.__dict__.keys()) is

['file', 'content_type_extra', 'image', 'charset', '_name', 'content_type', '_size', 'field_name']

and the output of print(form_img.image) for an Png Image is:

<PIL.PngImagePlugin.PngImageFile image mode=RGBA size=183x161 at 0x7F087B2E6B90>

and for an JPG it is:

<PIL.JpegImagePlugin.JpegImageFile image mode=RGB size=400x400 at 0x7F087B16EC50>

Is it possible to encode the received image as base64 and save it into the database from stream and with out temporarily saving it somewhere?

Edit: got it working now!

b64_img = base64.b64encode(form_img.file.read())

That was basically everything!

Answer 1

Yes it's possible to do it easily with PIL !

How to :

Save image in the buffer and encode it in base64.

import base64
import cStringIO

img_buffer = cStringIO.StringIO()
image.save(img_buffer, format="imageFormatYouWant")
img_str = base64.b64encode(img_buffer.getvalue())

Or :

with open("yourImage.ext", "rb") as image_file:
    encoded_string = base64.b64encode(image_file.read())