Load a WPF BitmapImage from a System.Drawing.Bitmap

Question

I have an instance of a System.Drawing.Bitmap and would like to make it available to my WPF app in the form of a System.Windows.Media.Imaging.BitmapImage<

Answer 1

It took me some time to get the conversion working both ways, so here are the two extension methods I came up with:

using System.Drawing;
using System.Drawing.Imaging;
using System.IO;
using System.Windows.Media.Imaging;

public static class BitmapConversion {

    public static Bitmap ToWinFormsBitmap(this BitmapSource bitmapsource) {
        using (MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream()) {
            BitmapEncoder enc = new BmpBitmapEncoder();
            enc.Frames.Add(BitmapFrame.Create(bitmapsource));
            enc.Save(stream);

            using (var tempBitmap = new Bitmap(stream)) {
                // According to MSDN, one "must keep the stream open for the lifetime of the Bitmap."
                // So we return a copy of the new bitmap, allowing us to dispose both the bitmap and the stream.
                return new Bitmap(tempBitmap);
            }
        }
    }

    public static BitmapSource ToWpfBitmap(this Bitmap bitmap) {
        using (MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream()) {
            bitmap.Save(stream, ImageFormat.Bmp);

            stream.Position = 0;
            BitmapImage result = new BitmapImage();
            result.BeginInit();
            // According to MSDN, "The default OnDemand cache option retains access to the stream until the image is needed."
            // Force the bitmap to load right now so we can dispose the stream.
            result.CacheOption = BitmapCacheOption.OnLoad;
            result.StreamSource = stream;
            result.EndInit();
            result.Freeze();
            return result;
        }
    }
}