I encountered the same issue with uploaded images. You cannot pass along files to a Celery worker because Celery needs to be able to pickle the arguments to a task. My solution was to deconstruct the image data into a string and get all other info from the file, passing this data and info to the task, where I reconstructed the image. After that you can save it, which will send it to your storage backend (such as S3). If you want to associate the image with a model, just pass along the id of the instance to the task and retrieve it there, bind the image to the instance and save the instance.
When a file has been uploaded via a form, it is available in your view as a UploadedFile file-like object. You can get it directly out of request.FILES, or better first bind it to your form, run is_valid and retrieve the file-like object from form.cleaned_data. At that point at least you know it is the kind of file you want it to be. After that you can get the data using read(), and get the other info using other methods/attributes. See https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.4/topics/http/file-uploads/
I actually ended up writing and distributing a little package to save an image asyncly. Have a look at https://github.com/gterzian/django_async Right it's just for images and you could fork it and add functionalities for your situation. I'm using it with https://github.com/duointeractive/django-athumb and S3
answered 2013-02-12T10:50:19.930