A generic error occurred in GDI+, JPEG Image to MemoryStream

Question

This seems to be a bit of an infamous error all over the web. So much so that I have been unable to find an answer to my problem as my scenario doesn\'t fit. An exception ge

Answer 1

I'll add this cause of the error as well in hopes it helps some future internet traveler. :)

GDI+ limits the maximum height of an image to 65500

We do some basic image resizing, but in resizing we try to maintain aspect ratio. We have a QA guy who's a little too good at this job; he decided to test this with a ONE pixel wide photo that was 480 pixels tall. When the image was scaled to meet our dimensions, the height was north of 68,000 pixels and our app exploded with A generic error occurred in GDI+.

You can verify this yourself with test:

  int width = 480;
  var height = UInt16.MaxValue - 36; //succeeds at 65499, 65500
  try
  {
    while(true)
    {
      var image = new Bitmap(width, height);
      using(MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream())
      {
        //error will throw from here
        image.Save(ms, ImageFormat.Jpeg);
      }
      height += 1;
    }
  }
  catch(Exception ex)
  {
    //explodes at 65501 with "A generic error occurred in GDI+."
  }

It's too bad there's not a friendly .net ArgumentException thrown in the constructor of Bitmap.