Showing System.Drawing.Bitmap in MAUI form?

Question

Hello, I want to do a MAUI applciation able to read a USB camera from IDS and paint the incoming images in the main form. I'm able already to detect the camera initialise it and receive the incoming images. I'm able, also, to save those incoming images in the memory of the app, inside a System.Drawing.Bitmap object. And, I can put that object in the ViewModel, and also, if required, in the code behind the form, in the .xmln.cs file. But, and here is the real problem, I don't know how to assing that System.Drawing.Bitmap object, which is essentially an image, as a source for the control Image that I have in the MAUI form. The Image control has a Source, of type ImageSource, but I'm unable to find the way to convert my object to something compatible with ImageSource. Evidently, there must be a way to do that, and I guess it is not complicated, but I don't know how to do it. Doues anyone know how to paint that System.Drawing.Bitmap inside that Image control of the MAUI form? Thanks you all, good people.

Answer 1

Hello,

By referring to this official document, you could see that the Source of the Image in MAUI can be a Stream object Image - Load an image from a stream.

With this piece of information, you could refer to the following steps to convert Bitmap objects to Stream: Step 1: Convert Bitmap object to byte[]:

public static byte[] BitmapToBytes(Bitmap Bitmap)
{
        MemoryStream ms = null;
        try
        {
            ms = new MemoryStream();
            Bitmap.Save(ms, Bitmap.RawFormat);
            byte[] byteImage = new Byte[ms.Length];
            byteImage = ms.ToArray();
            return byteImage;
        }
        catch (ArgumentNullException ex)
        {
            throw ex;
        }
        finally
        {
            ms.Close();
        }
}

Step 2: Convert byte[] object to Stream:

public Stream BytesToStream(byte[] bytes)
{
        Stream stream = new MemoryStream(bytes);
        return stream;
}

Step 3: Display your Bitmap in Image control:

var bytes = BitmapToBytes(bitmap);
var stream = BytesToStream(bytes);
test_img.Source = ImageSource.FromStream(() => stream);

Update: After your feedback and optimization of this solution, you could use the following utility classes to save Bitmap directly to the Stream and read by the Image control:

public static class BitmapHelper 
{
    public static void BitmapToImage(Bitmap bitmap, Image image)
    {
        {
            using (MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream())
            {
                try
                {
                    bitmap.Save(stream, System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat.Bmp);
                    image.Source = ImageSource.FromStream(() => stream);
                }
                catch (Exception ex)
                {
                    throw ex;
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

Best Regards, Alec Liu.

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