I'm not sure I understand your question. I assume you are doing something along the lines of:

import base64

with open("yourfile.ext", "rb") as image_file:
    encoded_string = base64.b64encode(image_file.read())

You have to open the file first of course, and read its contents - you cannot simply pass the path to the encode function.

Edit: Ok, here is an update after you have edited your original question.

First of all, remember to use raw strings (prefix the string with 'r') when using path delimiters on Windows, to prevent accidentally hitting an escape character. Second, PIL's Image.open either accepts a filename, or a file-like (that is, the object has to provide read, seek and tell methods).

That being said, you can use cStringIO to create such an object from a memory buffer:

import cStringIO
import PIL.Image

# assume data contains your decoded image
file_like = cStringIO.StringIO(data)

img = PIL.Image.open(file_like)
img.show()

Try this code

Image base64 encoded format

Python code:

import os
import base64

image = 'test.jpg'

encoded_string = ""
with open(image, "rb") as image_file:
    encoded_string = base64.b64encode(image_file.read())
    file = encoded_string

You can encode the RGB directly to jpg in memory and create a base64 encoding of this.

jpg_img = cv2.imencode('.jpg', img)
b64_string = base64.b64encode(jpg_img[1]).decode('utf-8')

Full example:

import cv2
import base64
img = cv2.imread('test_image.jpg')
jpg_img = cv2.imencode('.jpg', img)
b64_string = base64.b64encode(jpg_img[1]).decode('utf-8')

The base 64 string should be decodable with https://codebeautify.org/base64-to-image-converter

I followed the solution from this link it seems to work for me. So when you read the image in binary convert it to a string and then just encode the string with base64. The following solution is from the link above. Here is the tested code.

import base64
image = open(image, 'rb') 
image_read = image.read() 
image_64_encode = base64.encodestring(image_read)