Saving image as a string (converting image to string)

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How to use this code in a save button for inserting image as a string in a text data type in sql server using c# winforms. The code below converts an image to string but I don't know how to use it in saving/inserting. Any help will be appreciated. Thank you!

What I have tried:

C#

public string ImageToBase64(Image image, 
  System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat format)
{
  using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream())
  {
    // Convert Image to byte[]
    image.Save(ms, format);
    byte[] imageBytes = ms.ToArray();

    // Convert byte[] to Base64 String
    string base64String = Convert.ToBase64String(imageBytes);
    return base64String;
  }
}

Posted 30-Aug-17 3:16am

aaaaaaaaaaa222

Updated 30-Aug-17 3:26am

CPallini

v2

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Jochen Arndt 30-Aug-17 9:32am

Just store it in the database as any other string. How to do that depends on the database interface used by your application.

However, with binary data it is common to store them as BLOB (Binary Large OBject) instead of base64 encoded strings which increases the storage size.

With very large and/or many images it is even common to store the images as they are on disk and have only the file name in the database.

2 solutions

Solution 1

Google is your friend.[^]

Posted 30-Aug-17 3:25am

CPallini

Comments

OriginalGriff 30-Aug-17 10:33am

Downvote countered.

CPallini 30-Aug-17 11:37am

Thank you, Griff! :-)

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OriginalGriff · Accepted Answer · 2017-08-30T03:59:00

Don't store images in Base64 in your DB - it's very inefficient and images are big enough to start with that it's often a bad idea to store them at all. Small numbers of Thumbnails (or thumb sized images) OK - but full sized images or large quantities and you start to slow everything down dramatically. A better idea is to store them in binary using a BLOB / IMAGE / VARBINARY column, or even better store a path to the file in the DB, and access the image that from that as necessary.

Inserting binary data is simple - provided you use parameterized queries which should always do anyway - you'll find the code here: Why do I get a "Parameter is not valid." exception when I read an image from my database?[^]