Convert POSTed Image to Base64 - php

Question

I have a site that I am working on and it uses the imgur api to upload user's profile picture, but it needs to be base64 to use the function I have:
function imgur($image) {
$client_id = "client_id_some_numbers_and_stuff";
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://api.imgur.com/3/image.json');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Authorization: Client-ID ' . $client_id));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, array('image' => base64_encode($image)));
$reply = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$reply = json_decode($reply);
$link = $reply->data->link;
return $link;
}
I get the image from a form input (<input type="file" id="pp" name="pp">). When I get the data from $_POST["pp"], it is set to the string of the filename, and nothing useful.
How can I get the image file and either pass it into the imgur() function, or convert it into base64 and then pass that into the imgur() function, and just remove the base64 encoding from the function.
Thanks :)
Edit: This post is different that the one marked as duplicate becuase I want to know how to send the form data elsewhere, and not have it uploaded to my site.

Answer 1

info of upload file contains $_FILES array
you need to get your upload file path in server and translate it into base64
$image = $_FILES["pp"]["tmp_name"];
$type = pathinfo($image, PATHINFO_EXTENSION);
$data = file_get_contents($image);
$base64 = 'data:image/' . $type . ';base64,' . base64_encode($data);
imgur($base64);