Last week I took up an issue of adding upload functionality to the open-event server. I had to implement the upload in 3 places – one in the sponsor table to upload images, another in the user profile page and the third is to upload slides in the session form. However the basic function behind it remains the same. File upload makes use of the inbuilt werkzeug FileStorage class. A code snippet will help understand how it works:

So  on selecting the file it gets stored in the request.files object. It is temporarily stored in the FileStorage in werkzeug. Now we access the file’s name using request.files[‘files’] and then using the inbuilt save()  function in flask it gets saved to the folder specified by us. There are some frameworks available for file uploading in Flask but all this can be done using the standard libraries also and there is no such need of the frameworks.

However instead of storing just the direct name of the file we make use of the secure_filename of werkzeug to save it.

Thus the secure_filename stores the file in the format given in the image and makes uploading easier by converting the long url/image path to an easier one.