As admin, enable "Mobile services": Site administration ► Mobile app ► Mobile settings In a new or existing course add some blocks (via the course settings cog -> Turn editing on and then "Add block" via the left flat menu Ensure that at there is at least one HTML block where you included images in the content via the text editor. Create a Token in the mobile app service for a student in the course Click on Site administration ► Plugins ► Web services ► Manage tokens Open the console an execute this new curl request, replacing wstoken with the token you just created and the site url with yours. You also need to replace the courseid with the id of the course you used. curl 'http://localhost/m/stable_master/webservice/rest/server.php?moodlewsrestformat=json' --data 'courseid=2&returncontents=1&wsfunction=core_block_get_course_blocks&wstoken=3af67232a7596ceb658df4db329e5ad6' | python -m "json.tool" Now, check that in the response: You see listed all the blocks displayed in the course For each blocks, you see a "contents" field that contains the block title and main contents (title and content fields) For the HTML block where you included images you also see a contents->files field with all the files you included via the text editor. Now, set the value of the returncontents parameter in the CURL request to 0 and execute again the CURL request. Check that you don't see the contents field for any block anymore.