Images in Background Workers in WPF Application

Question

I have the following code snippet that I use to create a List to add to a scrollviewer as a binding in a WPF application:

private void LoadThumbs(object send         


        

Answer 1

Do not create Image elements in code behind. Instead, use an ItemControl with an appropriate ItemTemplate:

Bind it to a view model like shown below, which is capable of asynchronously loading the image files. It is important that the BitmapImages are frozen to make them cross-thread accessible.

public class ViewModel
{
    public ObservableCollection Images { get; }
        = new ObservableCollection();

    public async Task LoadImagesAsync(IEnumerable filenames)
    {
        foreach (var filename in filenames)
        {
            Images.Add(await Task.Run(() => LoadImage(filename)));
        }
    }

    public ImageSource LoadImage(string filename)
    {
        var bitmap = new BitmapImage();
        bitmap.BeginInit();
        bitmap.CacheOption = BitmapCacheOption.OnLoad;
        bitmap.DecodePixelWidth = 200;
        bitmap.UriSource = new Uri(filename);
        bitmap.EndInit();
        bitmap.Freeze();
        return bitmap;
    }
}

which is initialized like this:

private ViewModel viewModel = new ViewModel();

public MainWindow()
{
    InitializeComponent();
    DataContext = viewModel;
}

private async void Button_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
    ...
    await viewModel.LoadImagesAsync(..., "*.jpg"));
}

---

An alternative view model method could load the BitmapImages directly from a FileStream instead of an Uri:

public ImageSource LoadImage(string filename)
{
    using (var stream = new FileStream(filename, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read))
    {
        var bitmap = new BitmapImage();
        bitmap.BeginInit();
        bitmap.DecodePixelWidth = 200;
        bitmap.CacheOption = BitmapCacheOption.OnLoad;
        bitmap.StreamSource = stream;
        bitmap.EndInit();
        bitmap.Freeze();
        return bitmap;
    }
}