How to create an endpoint which takes a path, load the image and serve it to the client

I want to serve an image to a client by converting it to a byte but for some reason byteArrayOutputStream.toByteArray() is empty. I get a response status of 200 which means it is served. I looked at various documentations on reading an image file from a directory using BufferedImage and then converting BufferedImage to a byteArray from oracle https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/2d/images/loadimage.html and https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/2d/images/saveimage.html but for some reason byteArray is still empty

This controller

@GetMapping(path = "/get/image/{name}")
public ResponseEntity<byte[]> displayImage(String name) throws IOException {
        String photoPathFromDatabase = productRepository.findPhotoByName(name);
        Path path = Paths.get(photoPathFromDatabase);

        ByteArrayOutputStream byteArrayOutputStream = new ByteArrayOutputStream();



        BufferedImage image = ImageIO.read(path.toFile()); // Reading the image from path or file
        String fileType = Files.probeContentType(path.toFile().toPath()); // Getting the file type
        ImageIO.write(image, fileType, byteArrayOutputStream); // convert from BufferedImage to byte array
        byte[] bytes = byteArrayOutputStream.toByteArray();

        return ResponseEntity
                .ok()
                .contentType(MediaType.valueOf(fileType))
                .body(bytes);
    }

After I debugged the method

Answer

You should read the bytes of the file directly, rather than use an excessive amount of methods from different classes. This can be done with the class java.nio.file.Files.

byte[] contentBytes = Files.readAllBytes(path); //Throws IOException