C# Picturebox transparent background doesn't seem to work

Question

For a project of mine I need images to display with a transparent background. I made some .png images that have a transparent background(to check this I opened them in Photo

Answer 1

There's an excellent solution on the CodeProject website at

Making Transparent Controls - No Flickering

essentially the trick is to override the paintbackground event so as to loop through all the controls underlying the picturebox and redraw them. The function is:-

protected override void OnPaintBackground(PaintEventArgs e)
       // Paint background with underlying graphics from other controls
   {
       base.OnPaintBackground(e);
       Graphics g = e.Graphics;

       if (Parent != null)
       {
           // Take each control in turn
           int index = Parent.Controls.GetChildIndex(this);
           for (int i = Parent.Controls.Count - 1; i > index; i--)
           {
               Control c = Parent.Controls[i];

               // Check it's visible and overlaps this control
               if (c.Bounds.IntersectsWith(Bounds) && c.Visible)
               {
                   // Load appearance of underlying control and redraw it on this background
                   Bitmap bmp = new Bitmap(c.Width, c.Height, g);
                   c.DrawToBitmap(bmp, c.ClientRectangle);
                   g.TranslateTransform(c.Left - Left, c.Top - Top);
                   g.DrawImageUnscaled(bmp, Point.Empty);
                   g.TranslateTransform(Left - c.Left, Top - c.Top);
                   bmp.Dispose();
               }
           }
       }
   }