Question

I have model UserProfile with field avatar = models.ImageField(upload_to=upload_avatar)

upload_avatar function names image file according user.id (12.png for example).

But when user updates the avatar, new avatar name coincide with old avatar name and Django adds suffix to file name (12-1.png for example).

There are way to overwrite file instead of create new file?

Answer 1

Yeah, this has come up for me, too. Here’s what I’ve done.

Model:

from app.storage import OverwriteStorage

class Thing(models.Model):
    image = models.ImageField(max_length=SOME_CONST, storage=OverwriteStorage(), upload_to=image_path)

Also defined in models.py:

def image_path(instance, filename):
    return os.path.join('some_dir', str(instance.some_identifier), 'filename.ext')

In a separate file, storage.py:

from django.core.files.storage import FileSystemStorage
from django.conf import settings
import os

class OverwriteStorage(FileSystemStorage):

    def get_available_name(self, name):
        """Returns a filename that's free on the target storage system, and
        available for new content to be written to.

        Found at http://djangosnippets.org/snippets/976/

        This file storage solves overwrite on upload problem. Another
        proposed solution was to override the save method on the model
        like so (from https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/11663):

        def save(self, *args, **kwargs):
            try:
                this = MyModelName.objects.get(id=self.id)
                if this.MyImageFieldName != self.MyImageFieldName:
                    this.MyImageFieldName.delete()
            except: pass
            super(MyModelName, self).save(*args, **kwargs)
        """
        # If the filename already exists, remove it as if it was a true file system
        if self.exists(name):
            os.remove(os.path.join(settings.MEDIA_ROOT, name))
        return name

Obviously, these are sample values here, but overall this works well for me and this should be pretty straightforward to modify as necessary.