How can I convert an image into a Base64 string?

You can use the Base64 Android class:

String encodedImage = Base64.encodeToString(byteArrayImage, Base64.DEFAULT);

You'll have to convert your image into a byte array though. Here's an example:

Bitmap bm = BitmapFactory.decodeFile("/path/to/image.jpg");
ByteArrayOutputStream baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
bm.compress(Bitmap.CompressFormat.JPEG, 100, baos); // bm is the bitmap object
byte[] b = baos.toByteArray();

* Update *

If you're using an older SDK library (because you want it to work on phones with older versions of the OS) you won't have the Base64 class packaged in (since it just came out in API level 8 AKA version 2.2).

Check this article out for a workaround:

How to base64 encode decode Android

Instead of using Bitmap, you can also do this through a trivial InputStream. Well, I am not sure, but I think it's a bit efficient.

InputStream inputStream = new FileInputStream(fileName); // You can get an inputStream using any I/O API
byte[] bytes;
byte[] buffer = new byte[8192];
int bytesRead;
ByteArrayOutputStream output = new ByteArrayOutputStream();

try {
    while ((bytesRead = inputStream.read(buffer)) != -1) {
        output.write(buffer, 0, bytesRead);
    }
}
catch (IOException e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
}

bytes = output.toByteArray();
String encodedString = Base64.encodeToString(bytes, Base64.DEFAULT);

If you need Base64 over JSON, check out Jackson: it has explicit support for binary data read/write as Base64 at both the low level (JsonParser, JsonGenerator) and data-binding level. So you can just have POJOs with byte[] properties, and encoding/decoding is automatically handled.

And pretty efficiently too, should that matter.

// Put the image file path into this method
public static String getFileToByte(String filePath){
    Bitmap bmp = null;
    ByteArrayOutputStream bos = null;
    byte[] bt = null;
    String encodeString = null;
    try{
        bmp = BitmapFactory.decodeFile(filePath);
        bos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
        bmp.compress(Bitmap.CompressFormat.JPEG, 100, bos);
        bt = bos.toByteArray();
        encodeString = Base64.encodeToString(bt, Base64.DEFAULT);
    }
    catch (Exception e){
      e.printStackTrace();
    }
    return encodeString;
}

If you're doing this on Android, here's a helper copied from the React Native codebase:

import java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream;
import java.io.Closeable;
import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;

import android.util.Base64;
import android.util.Base64OutputStream;
import android.util.Log;

// You probably don't want to do this with large files
// (will allocate a large string and can cause an OOM crash).
private String readFileAsBase64String(String path) {
  try {
    InputStream is = new FileInputStream(path);
    ByteArrayOutputStream baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
    Base64OutputStream b64os = new Base64OutputStream(baos, Base64.DEFAULT);
    byte[] buffer = new byte[8192];
    int bytesRead;
    try {
      while ((bytesRead = is.read(buffer)) > -1) {
        b64os.write(buffer, 0, bytesRead);
      }
      return baos.toString();
    } catch (IOException e) {
      Log.e(TAG, "Cannot read file " + path, e);
      // Or throw if you prefer
      return "";
    } finally {
      closeQuietly(is);
      closeQuietly(b64os); // This also closes baos
    }
  } catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
    Log.e(TAG, "File not found " + path, e);
    // Or throw if you prefer
    return "";
  }
}

private static void closeQuietly(Closeable closeable) {
  try {
    closeable.close();
  } catch (IOException e) {
  }
}

How can I convert an image into a Base64 string?

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