# Image data with Databricks

> Image data with Databricks - Import image files using Spark and prepare them into a data frame
> suitable for ingest into DataRobot.

This Markdown file sits beside the HTML page at the same path (with a `.md` suffix). It summarizes the topic and lists links for tools and LLM context.

Companion generated at `2026-05-06T18:17:09.581203+00:00` (UTC).

## Primary page

- [Image data with Databricks](https://docs.datarobot.com/en/docs/api/dev-learning/accelerators/model-building-tuning/image-databricks.html): Full documentation for this topic (HTML).

## Related documentation

- [Developer documentation](https://docs.datarobot.com/en/docs/api/index.html): Linked from this page.
- [Developer learning](https://docs.datarobot.com/en/docs/api/dev-learning/index.html): Linked from this page.
- [AI accelerators](https://docs.datarobot.com/en/docs/api/dev-learning/accelerators/index.html): Linked from this page.
- [Model building and fine-tuning](https://docs.datarobot.com/en/docs/api/dev-learning/accelerators/model-building-tuning/index.html): Linked from this page.

## Documentation content

[Access this AI accelerator on GitHub](https://github.com/datarobot-community/ai-accelerators/blob/main/advanced_ml_and_api_approaches/image_dataprep_classification_databricks/Image%20Data%20Preparation.ipynb)

Visual AI allows you to leverage images in your models just like any other type of data. In this accelerator, you will import image files using Spark and prepare them into a data frame suitable for ingest into DataRobot. Then you will leverage DataRobot through code to rapidly train and deploy a powerful multiclass image classifier.

While there are other methods of ingesting image data into DataRobot, in this notebook you will encode the image data directly into the data frame using base64 encoding. This methodology allows you to keep all of the relevant data in a single data frame, and works well for a Databricks environment. This technique also extends widely to a wide variety of multimodal datasets.

Dive in to go from Databricks image data to a deployed classifier.