Convert HttpPostedFileBase to byte[]

Question

As Darin says, you can read from the input stream - but I'd avoid relying on all the data being available in a single go. If you're using .NET 4 this is simple:

MemoryStream target = new MemoryStream();
model.File.InputStream.CopyTo(target);
byte[] data = target.ToArray();

It's easy enough to write the equivalent of CopyTo in .NET 3.5 if you want. The important part is that you read from HttpPostedFileBase.InputStream.

For efficient purposes you could check whether the stream returned is already a MemoryStream:

byte[] data;
using (Stream inputStream = model.File.InputStream)
{
    MemoryStream memoryStream = inputStream as MemoryStream;
    if (memoryStream == null)
    {
        memoryStream = new MemoryStream();
        inputStream.CopyTo(memoryStream);
    }
    data = memoryStream.ToArray();
}

You can read it from the input stream:

public ActionResult ManagePhotos(ManagePhotos model)
{
    if (ModelState.IsValid)
    {
        byte[] image = new byte[model.File.ContentLength];
        model.File.InputStream.Read(image, 0, image.Length); 

        // TODO: Do something with the byte array here
    }
    ...
}

And if you intend to directly save the file to the disk you could use the model.File.SaveAs method. You might find the following blog post useful.