How to upload multiple images to Django?

Question

I am trying to send some data from the client side (react native) that includes a few images so I append them to formdata and successfully send it through a post request but I am having trouble figuring out how to handle it on the server side.

My react code:

const post = async () => {
    const token = await getToken();
    const [description, setDescription] = useState('');

    const formData = new FormData();

    images.forEach((image) => {
      formData.append(`images`, {
        uri: image,
        type: 'image/jpeg',
        name: image,
      });
    });
    formData.append('description', description);
    console.log('formdata:', formData);

    try {
      await axios.post(URL, formData, {
        headers: {
          'Content-Type': 'multipart/form-data',
          Authorization: token,
        },
      });
    } catch (e) {
      console.log(e);
    }
  };

when i console log formdata on client side i get:

formdata: [["images", {"name": "/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator/Devices/123.jpg", "type": "image/jpeg", "uri": "/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator/Devices/123.jpg"}], ["images", {"name": "/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator/Devices/456.jpg", "type": "image/jpeg", "uri": "/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator/Devices/456.jpg"}], ["description", "Test"]]

on my server side (django/drf):

models.py:

class Post(models.Model):
    user_id = models.ForeignKey(
        User, on_delete=models.CASCADE, default=None
    )
    images = models.FileField(
        max_length=3000, default=None, null=True, blank=True, upload_to='media/post_images')
    description = models.TextField(null=False, default=None)
    date = models.DateTimeField(editable=False, auto_now_add=True)

serializers.py:

class PostSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    images = serializers.FileField()

class Meta:
    model = Post
    fields = "__all__"

views.py

class PostView(APIView):
    serializer_class = PostSerializer
    parser_classes = (MultiPartParser, FormParser)

def post(self, request, format=None):

    form_data = request.data

    images = form_data.get('images')
    description = form_data.get('description')
    user_id = self.request.user

    print(form_data)

    post = Post.objects.create(
        images=images, description=description, user_id=user_id)

    post.save()

    serializer = PostSerializer(post)

    return Response(serializer.data, status=status.HTTP_201_CREATED)

when i print the form_data in python i get:

<QueryDict: {'0': ['images'], '1.uri': ['/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator/Devices/123.jpg'], '1.type': ['image/jpeg'], '1.name': ['/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator/Devices/123.jpg'], '1.0': ['images'], '1.1.uri': ['/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator/Devices/456.jpg'], '1.1.type': ['image/jpeg'], '1.1.name': ['/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator/Devices/456.jpg'], '2.0': ['description'], '2.1': ['Test']}>

How can i extract the data and save it to the database?

Answer 1

Django is handling that for you. You can try to access your images with:

request.FILES.getlist("images")

This will give you a list of all the images that are found in the submitted form.