Send image from Ios application to web api service

Question

We have an IOS application which send images to a asp.net web api application. So we convert images to Base64 then we send it to the web service as a string .

The problem is that the size of the image is big so the conversion to base64 takes a lot of time and the size of the result string is bigger than the initial image's size.

I need to know :

• If another better way , instead of conversion to Base64, exists to convert the image before calling the web service

• I used Gzip to compress/decompress an array of bytes like this :

   static byte[] Compress(byte[] data)
      {
          using (var compressedStream = new MemoryStream())
          using (var zipStream = new GZipStream(compressedStream,  CompressionMode.Compress))
          {
              zipStream.Write(data, 0, data.Length);
              zipStream.Close();
              return compressedStream.ToArray();
          }
      }
  

Is it possible to convert image to array of bytes in IOS part then call the web service ? Or expose an object like compressedStream or GZipStream as a service argument?

Thanks,

Answer 1

it is possible to convert the image to a byte array, here's an SO answer which touches on that : how to convert byte array to image in ios

The biggest question however is this : do you actually need the image that big? You need to consider that the service will get slow once you have multiple users doing this and will more than likely grind to a halt which will make your app difficult/ slow to use.

You might want to consider reducing the image before sending it over. You can reduce the size, the quality and just make it smaller, then send the result over the wire.

Here is another SO post which touches on this : What's the easiest way to resize/optimize an image size with the iPhone SDK?

Of course if you are using xamarin and c# to build your app then it's even easier and you can find samples of code doing both these things.