Question

For reading a picture from a folder with my Silverlight application, I Set the source of a Bitmap image with the stream of the file. See the code below:

string path = Path.Combine(Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.MyDocuments), "Images", String.Format("{0}.jpg", _imageName));
if (File.Exists(path))
{
    Image = new BitmapImage();
    Image.SetSource(new MemoryStream(File.ReadAllBytes(path)));
}

The problem is that the image take a lot of time to show up and when I load a lot of pictures ( >400), I may get a insufficient memory error. I never had this error when loading a picture by the URI and I was wondering if it was possible to load it by the URI from a path. The code I tried:

string path = Path.Combine(Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.MyDocuments), "Images", String.Format("{0}.jpg", _imageName));
if (File.Exists(path))
{
    Image = new BitmapImage()
                {
                    UriSource = new Uri(path),
                    CreateOptions = BitmapCreateOptions.DelayCreation
                };
}

Do you have any hints to provide ?

Thank you!

Philippe

Answer 1

I realized that loading even when I loaded the pictures by the URI, it wasn’t loading every pictures. The software stopped loading pictures when it was taking 1.6gig of ram (out of 6gig). The difference with loading the picture by the stream is that it seems there is no protection against insufficient memory.

As I don’t display all the images ( I realized I have over 8000 pictures when they are loaded correctly) I only load in memory the image I need to display.

So every time I want a picture, I load it from the Hard Drive. When the pictures is no more displayed, the garbage collection get rid of them. This way, the application’s memory is always stable at around 300 meg.