How to Fetch and Display an Image from the Database in ASP.Net and C#

First of all, to do what you want, I would just copy the file to a temporary location and use that location for the "src" attribute. Later, you could delete the file. The much more complicated way is to create an aspx page that writes the image to the webpage as a binary stream. This page would grab the image from the database and just write the stream out in the response. You would then use this aspx page in the src attribute of your image. However, storing the image path in the database and actual file on the file system doesn't mean that the folder has to be browse-able or public. You can turn directory browsing off for example.

Create a custom IHttpHandler implementation that can serve your images from your database. You could, for example, get the bytes into a stream and copy that stream to the output of the web response.

Here is a simple example:

public class MyImageHandler : IHttpHandler
{
    public bool IsReusable { get { return true; } }

    public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext ctx)
    {
        Stream yourStream = ...; // This is where you get your data from your database
        ctx.Response.ContentType = "image/jpeg";
        yourStream.CopyTo(ctx.Response.OutputStream);
    }
}

Then you need to configure it to respond to the URLs you wish.

• You could either use the Web.config file to do this
• Or create an .ashx file and have it point to your own HTTP handler

If you have any questions about it, just write a comment.

You will need an aspx page reading the image from the database and returning the raw bytes.

Here's a quick sketch how to do this:

byte[] data = (byte[])myReader.getValue(0);

Response.ContentType = "image/jpeg"; //or whatever your used image type is
Response.OutputStream.Write(data, 0, data.Length);
Response.End();

An alternative would be to implement a custom HttpHandler for this.

The other part is "calling" this page from your img tags with a parameter specifying the image id:

myImage.Src = "/image.aspx?id=" + myReader.getValue(0).toString();