Question

I am building a windows project in .net 4.0 c#.

I am now saving images to hard drive, and that’s not taking any memory at all because i am only loading the image once i want to view it. But now i need to remove the creating of images in hard drive and create it some other way. Like creating a memory stream and save it to an object and serialize it down to hard drive. The important part is that i cant have the images visible in hard drive, they must be encrypted or in an object or something.

So….When i tried to put it in a memory stream and save it to a list and then serialize it down to drive, i got a HUGE program memory allocation because for every image i create,and save as memory stream in my list, i allocate that memory and my program gets over 2-300 mb big.

I really don’t have any idea of how to do this, can i somehow save it to memory stream and not allocate that memory in the program? Or can save it some other way without having the pictures totally visible as images in hard drive?

Main thing is as i said, i cant have the images as regular images on hard drive, they must not be able to be viewed by the user without the application. And i need to find a way that don’t allocate all computers memory.

Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

The file access is built on the principle of streams, which can be plug together in a chain. What you can do is, instead of directly reading/writing the images from/to disk through a filestream, you plug a CryptoStream between it.