Django REST Framework upload image: “The submitted data was not a file”

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The problem that you are hitting is that Django REST framework expects files to be uploaded as multipart form data, through the standard file upload methods. This is typically a file field, but the JavaScript Blob object also works for AJAX.

You are looking to upload the files using a base64 encoded string, instead of the raw file, which is not supported by default. There are implementations of a Base64ImageField out there, but the most promising one came by a pull request.

Since these were mostly designed for Django REST framework 2.x, I’ve improved upon the one from the pull request and created one that should be compatible with DRF 3.

serializers.py

from rest_framework import serializers    

class Base64ImageField(serializers.ImageField):
    """
    A Django REST framework field for handling image-uploads through raw post data.
    It uses base64 for encoding and decoding the contents of the file.

    Heavily based on
    https://github.com/tomchristie/django-rest-framework/pull/1268

    Updated for Django REST framework 3.
    """

    def to_internal_value(self, data):
        from django.core.files.base import ContentFile
        import base64
        import six
        import uuid

        # Check if this is a base64 string
        if isinstance(data, six.string_types):
            # Check if the base64 string is in the "data:" format
            if 'data:' in data and ';base64,' in data:
                # Break out the header from the base64 content
                header, data = data.split(';base64,')

            # Try to decode the file. Return validation error if it fails.
            try:
                decoded_file = base64.b64decode(data)
            except TypeError:
                self.fail('invalid_image')

            # Generate file name:
            file_name = str(uuid.uuid4())[:12] # 12 characters are more than enough.
            # Get the file name extension:
            file_extension = self.get_file_extension(file_name, decoded_file)

            complete_file_name = "%s.%s" % (file_name, file_extension, )

            data = ContentFile(decoded_file, name=complete_file_name)

        return super(Base64ImageField, self).to_internal_value(data)

    def get_file_extension(self, file_name, decoded_file):
        import imghdr

        extension = imghdr.what(file_name, decoded_file)
        extension = "jpg" if extension == "jpeg" else extension

        return extension

This should be used in replacement of the standard ImageField provided by Django REST framework. So your serializer would become

class ImageSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    image = Base64ImageField(
        max_length=None, use_url=True,
    )

    class Meta:
        model = Image
        fields = ("id", 'image', 'owner', 'time_created', )

This should allow you to either specify a base64-encoded string, or the standard Blob object that Django REST framework typically expects.

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