CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#imagewinformsbase64
Hugo Woesthuis
Hugo Woesthuis

Reputation: 193

Is it possible to load and encode images to base64 fast in C#?

I want to load an image and directly encode this to a base64 string. Small/low-res pictures load fast but loading a picture taken by an iPhone 5 for example (2448 x 3264, 2.61 MB) takes ages. Is there a way to load these images faster in my application?

Here is my C# code:

private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        Stream myStream = null;
        OpenFileDialog openFileDialog1 = new OpenFileDialog();
        //Setup OpenFileDialog

        if (openFileDialog1.ShowDialog() == DialogResult.OK)
        {
            if ((myStream = openFileDialog1.OpenFile()) != null)
            {
                using (myStream)
                {
                    string sFileName = openFileDialog1.FileName;
                    textBox1.Text = sFileName;
                    pictureBox1.ImageLocation = sFileName;
                    using (Bitmap bm = new Bitmap(sFileName))
                    {
                        using (var ms = new MemoryStream())
                        {
                            bm.Save(ms, ImageFormat.Jpeg);
                            base64 = Convert.ToBase64String(ms.ToArray());
                            textBox3.Text = base64;
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    }

Upvotes: 0

Views: 964

Answers (2)

Joe DF
Joe DF

Reputation: 5558

Yes, the method you are using is probably the most popular I've seen out there. I needed to convert images too so I wrote something using that same method. However, it was simply too inefficient and slow for me. I decided to look for workarounds. I found this small program written in C by John Walker called base64.exe. I made a wrapper around it with some modifications on the output.

The result is Base64encoder, but it was written relatively a long time ago. I've uploaded the source here: Base64encoder_v2.1-source.zip (released under MIT License)

I've later made a C library that can be found here: https://github.com/joedf/base64.c (released under MIT License)

You can either fork the wrapper or fork the c library into a c# library, or use some other library or write something from scratch... :/

Upvotes: 1

gandharv garg
gandharv garg

Reputation: 2191

It is recommended that you do not convert big sized images into Base64.. If you try to base64 larger images you will end up with a great deal of code in your html and lose out on the performance benefits...

References this & this.

Upvotes: 0

Related Questions