Visual Basic Code Snippet - Download Image from URL

Visual Basic Code Snippet - Download Image from URL

This .Net Visual Basic code snippet download image from URL. To use this function simply provide the URL of the image you like to download. This function read the image contents using URL and returns downloaded image as an image object. This function download image using web response stream.

''' <summary>
''' Function to download Image from website
''' </summary>
''' <param name="_URL">URL address to download image</param>
''' <returns>Image</returns>
Public Function DownloadImage(ByVal _URL As String) As Image
    Dim _tmpImage As Image = Nothing

    Try
        ' Open a connection
        Dim _HttpWebRequest As System.Net.HttpWebRequest = CType(System.Net.HttpWebRequest.Create(_URL), System.Net.HttpWebRequest)

        _HttpWebRequest.AllowWriteStreamBuffering = True

        ' You can also specify additional header values like the user agent or the referer: (Optional)
        _HttpWebRequest.UserAgent = "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1)"
        _HttpWebRequest.Referer = "http://www.google.com/"

        ' set timeout for 20 seconds (Optional)
        _HttpWebRequest.Timeout = 20000

        ' Request response:
        Dim _WebResponse As System.Net.WebResponse = _HttpWebRequest.GetResponse()

        ' Open data stream:
        Dim _WebStream As System.IO.Stream = _WebResponse.GetResponseStream()

        ' convert webstream to image
        _tmpImage = Image.FromStream(_WebStream)

        ' Cleanup
        _WebResponse.Close()
        _WebResponse.Close()
    Catch _Exception As Exception
        ' Error
        Console.WriteLine("Exception caught in process: {0}", _Exception.ToString())
        Return Nothing
    End Try

    Return _tmpImage
End Function

Here is a simple example showing how to use above function (DownloadImage) to download image and show it in a PictureBox and how to save it on a local disk.

' Download web image
Dim _Image As Image = Nothing
_Image = DownloadImage("http://www.youdomain.com/sample-image.jpg")

' check for valid image
If _Image IsNot Nothing Then
    ' show image in picturebox
    pictureBox1.Image = _Image

    ' lets save image to disk
    _Image.Save("C:\\sample-image.jpg")
End If

VB Keywords Used:

• HttpWebRequest
• WebResponse
• Image
• Stream
• StreamReader
• ExecuteReader
• Exception

Code Snippet Information:

• Applies To: .Net, VB, Visual Basic, CLI, HTML, HttpWebRequest, WebResponse, StreamReader, Data Mining, Download Image from URL
• Programming Language : Visual Basic (VB)

External Resources:

• HttpWebRequest Class
• WebResponse Class
• Stream Class
• StreamReader Class
• Exception Class

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