How can I take a byte array of a TIFF image and turn it into a System.Drawing.Image object?

Question

I have a byte[] array, the contents of which represent a TIFF file (as in, if I write out these bytes directly to a file using the BinaryWriter object, it forms a perfectly valid TIFF file) and I'm trying to turn it into a System.Drawing.Image object so that I can use it for later manipulation (feeding into a multipage TIFF object)

The problem I'm having is that the commonly accepted code for this task:

    public Image byteArrayToImage(byte[] byteArrayIn)
    {
        MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream(byteArrayIn);
        Image returnImage = Image.FromStream(ms, true);
        return returnImage;
    }

doesn't work for me. The second line of the above method where it calls the Image.FromStream method dies at runtime, saying

Parameter Not Valid

I believe that the method is choking on the fact that this is a TIFF file but I cannot figure out how to make the FromStream method accept this fact.

How do I turn a byte array of a TIFF image into an Image object?

Also, like I said the end goal of this is to have a byte array representing a multipage TIFF file, which contains the TIFF files for which I have byte array objects of right now. If there's a much better way to go about doing this, I'm all for it.

Answer 1

OK, I found the issue, and it was from a part of the code unrelated to the part of the code I was asking about. The data was being passed as a string, I was converting it to a byte array (this was a test rig so I was trying to simulate the byte array that I get in the main app), then converting that to a MemoryStream, then making an Image from that.

What I failed to realize was that the string was Base64 encoded. Calling Convert.FromBase64String() caused it to turn into a byte array which wouldn't kill the Image.FromStream() method.

So basically it boiled down to a stupid mistake on my part. But hey, the code above is still useful and this page will probably serve as a Google result as to how to avoid this mistake to someone else.

Also, I found an easy way to construct a Multi-Page TIFF from my byte arrays here.

Answer 2

Edit: The assumption below is not correct, I had a chance to fire up my IDE later and tested with and without Write and both populated the MemoryStream correctly.

I think you need to write to your MemeoryStream first.

As if my memory (no pun intended) serves me correctly this:

MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream(byteArrayIn);

Creates a memory stream of that size.

You then need to write your byte array contents to the memory stream:

ms.Write(byteArrayIn, 0, byteArrayIn.Length);

See if that fixes it.