How do I serialize an ImageField in Django?

Question

I'm trying to serialize one of my models which has an ImageField. The inbuilt serializer can't seem to serialize this and therefore I thought of writing a custom serializer. Could you tell me how I could serialize an image and use this with the default JSON serializer in Django?

Thanks

Answer 1

I wrote an extension to the simplejson encoder. Instead to serializing the image to base643, it returns the path of the image. Here's a snippet:

def encode_datetime(obj):
    """
    Extended encoder function that helps to serialize dates and images
    """
    if isinstance(obj, datetime.date):
        try:
            return obj.strftime('%Y-%m-%d')
        except ValueError, e:
            return ''

    if isinstance(obj, ImageFieldFile):
        try:
            return obj.path
        except ValueError, e:
            return ''

    raise TypeError(repr(obj) + " is not JSON serializable")