This problem occurs on a stable Ussuri Devstack. I issue this command to create a protected image: $ openstack image create myimage2 --file ~/myvm1.qcow2 --disk-format qcow2 --protected and get this error message back: BadRequestException: 400: Client Error for url: http://192.168.1.200/image/v2/images, 400 Bad Request: On instance['protected']:: 'type': 'boolean'}: {'description': 'If true, image will not be deletable.',: 'True': Provided object does not match schema 'image': 'True' is not of type 'boolean': Failed validating 'type' in schema['properties']['protected']: It seems that image creation fails because 'True' is not of type 'boolean' Am I looking at a bug or am I doing something wrong? I do have a great workaround: First, create the image without the protected flag. Then: $ openstack image set --protected myimage2 This works.