Django: have admin take image file but store it as a base64 string

Question

I was tasked with creating an admin view such that a user could input an image file, which however would be stored as a base64 string as a model field rather than exist in a static files dir on our server.

I'm unclear on how exactly this process would be done, should I be intercepting the POST request from the admin view and pre-processing it to be stored in the field? Should I be overwriting the save method of the base form? I'm a little confused by the different methods as I'm new to Django and have been unable to produce a working result.

Here's my setup:

models.py

from django.db import models

class Product(models.Model):
    organization = models.ForeignKey(Organization)
    name = models.CharField(max_length=50) 
    logo = models.TextField() 

admin.py

from django.contrib import admin
from .models import Product 

class ProductAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    exclude = ('logo',)

admin.site.register(Product, ProductAdmin)

misc.py

#how i'd process an image?
from PIL import Image
from base64 import b64encode

def image_to_b64(image_file):
    imgdata = Image(image_file)
    encoded = b64encode(open(imgdata, 'rb'))
    return encoded

Answer 1

from django.db import models

class Product(models.Model):
    organization = models.ForeignKey(Organization)
    name = models.CharField(max_length=50) 
    logo = models.TextField()
    logo_image = models.ImageFiled(null=True, blank=True, upload_to='logo')


def image_to_b64(image_file):
    import base64
    with open(image_file.path, "rb") as f:
        encoded_string = base64.b64encode(f.read())
        return encoded_string

from django.dispatch import receiver
from django.db.models.signals import post_save, m2m_changed


@receiver(post_save, sender=Product)
def create_base64_str(sender, instance=None, created=False, **kwargs):
    if created:
        instance.logo = image_to_b64(instance.logo_image)
        instance.logo_image.delete()
        instance.save()