C# Image to Byte Array and Byte Array to Image Converter Class

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Introduction

Recently I was looking for a class which could convert a System.Drawing.Image to byte[] array and vice versa. After a lot of searching on Google, I realised that it would be faster for me to write this class and also share it with the community.

The class which I wrote is called ImageConverter.cs. The class has two methods.

First method: Convert Image to byte[] array:

public byte[] imageToByteArray(System.Drawing.Image imageIn)
{
 MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream();
 imageIn.Save(ms,System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat.Gif);
 return  ms.ToArray();
}

This method uses the System.Drawing.Image.Save method to save the image to a memorystream. The memorystream can then be used to return a byte array using the ToArray() method in the MemoryStream class.

Second method: Convert byte[] array to Image:

public Image byteArrayToImage(byte[] byteArrayIn)
{
     MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream(byteArrayIn);
     Image returnImage = Image.FromStream(ms);
     return returnImage;
}

This method uses the Image.FromStream method in the Image class to create a method from a memorystream which has been created using a byte array. The image thus created is returned in this method.

The way I happen to use this method was to transport an image to a web service, by converting it to a byte array and vice-versa.

Hope this class is useful to the community as well. The code of ImageConverter.cs can be downloaded from the link at the top of this article.

Rajan Tawate