Question

I’ve looked everywhere, but can’t seem to find a solution to this problem.

I’m making a personal app to store information, and one of the things I would like stored within the DB file is a thumbnail for each entry. I have loaded the pictures from files, but I would like to be able to save the DB without needing the file to be physically present afterwards. In other words, I would like the separate the image variable from its file, but still keep the image data within that variable.

I don’t really have a snippet to post, as I’m not sure how to approach this problem. Any help would be greatly appreciated! I’m using a picturebox to load the image, and have an image variable in my object, but when I store the file in that image, it still requires the .jpg to be where I selected it from…

EDIT: I should be more specific, I’m not using SQL or anything like that, I’m simply serializing the object used to store my database into a file. I guess I’m using “db” in a more general sense…

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can try one of the following approaches:

1. Use WPF and the System.Windows.Media.Imaging namespace
2. Use COM Interop with the WIC interfaces (see http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/wictools for WicCop which contains an export of all of the APIs for C#).
3. The System.Drawing.Image class can also be helpful for you if you wanna do something rudiementary like read an image from from the disk and write it to another stream to save in the DB.