I’ve spent a good deal of my professional life arguing against using protobuffers. They’re clearly written by amateurs, unbelievably ad-hoc, mired in gotchas, tricky to compile, and solve a problem that nobody but Google really has. If these problems of protobuffers remained quarantined in serialization abstractions, my complaints would end there. But unfortunately, the bad design of protobuffers is so persuasive that these problems manage to leak their way into your code as well.

import magic
from django.core.files.uploadedfile import InMemoryUploadedFile

def get_mime_type_from_content(file: InMemoryUploadedFile) -> str:
    """Reads the initial bytes of a file to determine its actual MIME type."""
    try:
        initial_bytes = file.read(2048)
        file.seek(0)
        return magic.from_buffer(initial_bytes, mime=True)
    except Exception as err:
        raise Exception(f"Failed to detect MIME type: {err}")

def check_file_is_image(file: InMemoryUploadedFile) -> bool:
    """Check if the uploaded file is an image based on its MIME type."""
    try:
        mime_type = get_mime_type_from_content(file)
        return mime_type.startswith("image/")
    except Exception as err:
        print(f"[ERROR] check_file_is_image: {err}")
        return False