converting base64 to image and showing in gridview

Question

i'm working on a website that takes its data from a web service. Our Android developer gave me a Base64 string like this.

iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAKAAAAB4CAYAAAB1ovlvAAAABHNCSVQICAgIf. . . . . . . . . .

I'm saving this string to my database. I would like to know how I can convert this to an image.

Answer 1

Here is the solution for you

public Image Base64ToImage(string base64String)
{
  // Convert Base64 String to byte[]
  byte[] imageBytes = Convert.FromBase64String(base64String);
  MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream(imageBytes, 0,imageBytes.Length);

  // Convert byte[] to Image
  ms.Write(imageBytes, 0, imageBytes.Length);
  Image image = Image.FromStream(ms, true);
  return image;
}

Answer 2

If you're showing it in a web page (You added asp.net as one of your tags so I'm assuming this is for the web) you can cheat and do this:

<img src="data:image/png;base64,<%=base64String%>"/>

This assumes that the image is a png, otherwise change it to image/jpg or whatever.

The downside is this stops the image being cached. So in practice the solution by @Sachin is more practical. This way is just neat if you want to avoid saving the files for whatever reason (or just want a 'I need it to work now' solution)