v0 exports images as base64 text, not binary

I was playing around with v0 and it gave me a really good landing page. But when I downloaded the zip, the images were not included at all.

Turns out v0 doesn't export anything under public/ in the zip. So I copied the image files into a different folder inside v0 (outside of public/) and downloaded again. Got the files, but then none of them would open. Not in the browser, not in my image viewer, nothing.

Diagnosing the Problem

Ran the file command to check what the downloaded files actually were:

Code

file public/images/*

Output:

Code

about.jpg:  ASCII text, with very long lines (65536), with no line terminators
hero-bg.jpg:        ASCII text, with very long lines (65536), with no line terminators
logo.png:   ASCII text, with very long lines (20936), with no line terminators
...

The files were ASCII text, not binary images. v0 had saved them as raw base64-encoded strings instead of actual binary image data.

You can confirm this by looking at the file contents:

Code

head -c 80 public/images/logo.png
# iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAA...

iVBORw0KGgo is the base64 encoding of the PNG magic bytes.

Fix

Decode all the files back to binary using base64 -d:

Code

for f in public/images/*.jpg public/images/*.png; do
  base64 -d "$f" > "${f}.tmp" && mv "${f}.tmp" "$f"
done

After running this, verify with file again:

Code

file public/images/*

Expected output:

Code

about.jpg:  JPEG image data, baseline, precision 8, 1024x1024, components 3
hero-bg.jpg:        JPEG image data, baseline, precision 8, 1024x1024, components 3
logo.png:   PNG image data, 432 x 126, 8-bit/color RGBA, non-interlaced
...

All images are now proper binary files and open correctly.

Why does this happen? (my guess)

Since v0 only exports code files, I think it just treats everything in the zip as a text/code file. So when an image gets pulled in this way, it gets serialized as a base64 string instead of written as a binary file — like it's treating the image as source code. Can't confirm this for sure but it's the only thing that makes sense to me.

The annoying part is that copying to a non-public/ folder is the only way to get images in the download zip right now, so you'll have to run the decode step every time.

I haven't tried connecting a git repo to see if it uploads the images to GitHub.

Diagnosing the Problem

Fix

Why does this happen? (my guess)

Command Menu