How to return an image in Spring Boot controller and serve like a file system

Finally fixed this... I had to add a ByteArrayHttpMessageConverter to my WebMvcConfigurerAdapter subclass:

@Override
public void configureMessageConverters(List<HttpMessageConverter<?>> converters) {
    final ByteArrayHttpMessageConverter arrayHttpMessageConverter = new ByteArrayHttpMessageConverter();
    final List<MediaType> list = new ArrayList<>();
    list.add(MediaType.IMAGE_JPEG);
    list.add(MediaType.APPLICATION_OCTET_STREAM);
    arrayHttpMessageConverter.setSupportedMediaTypes(list);
    converters.add(arrayHttpMessageConverter);

    super.configureMessageConverters(converters);
}

I believe this should work:

@RequestMapping(value = "/Image/{id:.+}", method = RequestMethod.GET)
public ResponseEntity<byte[]> getImage(@PathVariable("id") String id) {
    byte[] image = imageService.getImage(id);
    return ResponseEntity.ok().contentType(MediaType.IMAGE_JPEG).body(image);
}

Notice that the content-type is set for ResponseEntity, not for HttpServletResponse directly.

In case you don't know the file/mime type you can do this.... I've done this where i take an uploaded file and replace the file name with a guid and no extension and browsers / smart phones are able to load the image no issues. the second is to serve a file to be downloaded.

@RestController
@RequestMapping("img")
public class ImageController {

@GetMapping("showme")
public ResponseEntity<byte[]> getImage() throws IOException{
    File img = new File("src/main/resources/static/test.jpg");
    return ResponseEntity.ok().contentType(MediaType.valueOf(FileTypeMap.getDefaultFileTypeMap().getContentType(img))).body(Files.readAllBytes(img.toPath()));
}
@GetMapping("thing")
public ResponseEntity<byte[]> what() throws IOException{
    File file = new File("src/main/resources/static/thing.pdf");
    return ResponseEntity.ok()
            .header("Content-Disposition", "attachment; filename=" +file.getName())
            .contentType(MediaType.valueOf(FileTypeMap.getDefaultFileTypeMap().getContentType(file)))
            .body(Files.readAllBytes(file.toPath()));
}


}   

UPDATE in java 9+ you need to add compile 'com.sun.activation:javax.activation:1.2.0' to your dependencies this has also been moved or picked up by jakarta.see this post