How would I go about displaying images stored in varbinary(max) on a webpage? I have looked around and a lot of people recommend using the Image server control, but the images I am displaying are variable in number, so I'm not sure how I could use the control?
I also need to be able to resize and check the extension.
Typically, you would make a page that would directly write the bytes from your DB to the response stream and then set the response content type to the appropriate image format. Example:
Response.Write(myDbByteArray);
Response.ContentType = "image/png";
Response.End();
Then you would simply point images (even basic tags) to your url:
<img src="Path/ToMyPage.aspx?imgId=1" alt="Some Image" />
As long as you return the right content type, it doesnt matter that the image tag source is an aspx page.
Tejs give you the gist of it (ie. write the image into the response stream), but it left the interesting tidbits out. this article Download and Upload images from SQL Server via ASP.Net MVC shows how to transfer images to and from SQL Server using efficient streaming semantics and no intermediate file. You should try to avoid getting the image into a byte[] as most solutions naively suggest, because it leads to tremendous memory consumption and does not scale.
I'm using a generic handler for images (ashx) and in that handler I use response.binarywrite
