Displaying multi-page tiff files using the ImageBox control and C#

30 July 2016 Richard Moss c# | winforms | imagebox | tiff | sample 1 comment Files

Earlier this week I received a support request from a user wanting to know if it was possible to display multi-page tiff files using the ImageBox control. As I haven't wrote anything about this control for a while, it seemed a good opportunity for a short blog post.

Getting the number of pages in a TIFF file

One you have obtained an Image instance containing your tiff graphic, you can use the GetFrameCount method in conjunction with a predefined FrameDimension object in order to determine how many pages there are in the image.

private int GetPageCount(Image image)
{
  FrameDimension dimension;
dimension = FrameDimension.Page;
return image.GetFrameCount(dimension);
}

I have tested this code on several images, and even types which don't support pages (such as standard bitmaps) have always return a valid value. However, I have no way of knowing if this will always be the case (I have experienced first hand differences in how GDI+ handles actions between different versions of Windows). The Image object does offer a FrameDimensionsList property which returns a list of GUID's for the dimensions supported by the image, so you can always check the contents of this property first if you want to be extra sure.

Selecting a page

To change the active page the Image object represents, you can its SelectActiveFrame method, passing in a FrameDimension object and the zero-based page index. Again, we can use the predefined FrameDimension.Page property, similar to the following

image.SelectActiveFrame(FrameDimension.Page, page - 1);

After which, we need to instruct our `ImageBox` control (or whatever control we have bound the image to) to repaint to pick up the new image data.

imageBox.Invalidate();

> You don't need to reassign the image (which probably won't > work anyway if the control does an equality check), simply > instructing it to repaint via `Invalidate` or `Refresh` ought > to be sufficient.

A sample multi-page tiff file

As multi-page tiffs aren't exactly common images to be found in plenty on the internet, I've prepared a sample image based on a Newton's Cradle animation from Wikipedia.

Download NewtonsCradle.tif (4MB)

Short and sweet

That is all the information we need to create a viewer - you can download the project shown in the above animation from the links below.

Update History

2016-07-30 - First published
2020-11-21 - Updated formatting

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Filename	Description	Version	Release Date
ImageBoxTiffViewer.zip sha256: 52680d16d3825c2096f502526f0de41b2db2992679cfe8154ad3c9d7836b664c	Sample project for the displaying multi-page tiff files using the ImageBox control and C# blog post.		30/07/2016	Download

About The Author

Richard Moss

The founder of Cyotek, Richard enjoys creating new blog content for the site. Much more though, he likes to develop programs, and can often found writing reams of code. A long term gamer, he has aspirations in one day creating an epic video game. Until that time, he is mostly content with adding new bugs to WebCopy and the other Cyotek products.

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Comments

XiaoFei

# 21 February 2017 Reply

hi,this message come from China.I am a coder come from China.I am very happy to connteciton you.Your control is very nice. I hope more exchanges.

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