Python 3 files_download JPEG. Get UnicodeDecodeError

katec3

Using Python 3.8 I can successfully download a JPEG image. However, I want to access the exif information so am trying to use Pillow to open it. Whatever I try I get the following error: 'UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: invalid start byte'. I'd be grateful for any suggestions as I'm stumped.

 

Successful download code:

dbx = dropbox.Dropbox(os.environ['DROPBOX_TOKEN'])
for entry in dbx.files_list_folder('').entries:
    md, response = dbx.files_download('/' + entry.name)

    file_stream = response.content
print(len(file_stream), 'bytes; md:', md)

 

Code to open file_stream that results in error:

with open(file_stream, 'rb') as data:
# do things with file

 

Same error resulting from Pillow code:

image = Image.open(file_stream)
image.show()

 

Many thanks

Greg-DB

The Python open method expects a path-like object in order to open a file, but your file_stream is the response.content, which is already the actual file data, not a path-like object. You can use it directly without calling open.

 

As for using Pillow, I can't offer help for that as it's not made by Dropbox, but it looks like there's an example in the requests documentation that may be helpful here.