How to display image that is located on another server on the network (ASP.NET)

Question

I've got a ASP.NET site that's located on a local server (MY_SERVER). And one of the things it does is pull up tiff files which are located on another server (ANOTHER_SERVER). The location of each of these files is stored in SQL. I pull up each of these images and am supposed to display them. The problem is:

1. the files are not named with a tiff extension (does it matter?)

2. they aren't displaying at all.

I am using an Image control to display these images, and I'm not sure if it matters that the extension is not set (does the image control know the difference between an jpg and a tiff without the extension?)

I am guessing the images aren't displaying because they are not on the same server MY_SERVER that the images are located (ANOTHER_SERVER). Any ideas on how to fix this?

edit: actually displaying the tiff files were amazingly simple:

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    Response.ContentType = "image/png";
    new Bitmap(Request.QueryString["ImagePath"]).Save(Response.OutputStream, ImageFormat.Gif);

}

but because the images are located on ANOTHER_SERVER I still can't access them. I may just do a hack where I copy them to a local directory on MY_SERVER but there's gotta be a simple way to fix this. Anyone?

Answer 1

You should be able to display an image from another server if your img tag src is properly setup and the server is accessible. However, I don't believe that most browsers support directly viewing tiff files. There are a number of tiff viewers available (google it).

You might also try an <embed> tag and see if it does the trick (look here). The user's computer would have to know how to deal with tiffs.

Answer 2

Are the images on ANOTHER_SERVER accessible via HTTP or are you trying to display them in an img tag using their UNC path?

Since web pages are viewed on client machines, the paths to resources (images/css/scripts etc) must be accessible from the client's machine. Even if they are accessible from the server, if they aren't accessible from the client they won't be viewable.

I suspect in this instance MY_SERVER can access the tiffs on ANOTHER_SERVER, however the path to ANOTHER_SERVER means nothing to the client accessing the page.

You will either need to read the image in from the disk and display it as an image using a customer handler, or expose the images on ANOTHER_SERVER via HTTP and reference them that way (which means the client must be able to directly connect to ANOTHER_SERVER).

Answer 3

1. Regardless of what tag you use, does ANOTHER_SERVER store the images in an internet accessible location? If not, you cannot serve them directly on the internet. You can try downloading the file with Response.WriteFile.
2. The <img /> tag is not meant to serve TIFFs. The QuickTime plugin is a free TIFF viewer, but it is not very flexible. Where I work, we use Atalasoft's dotImage, which converts TIFFs to tiled PNG on the fly, but it is not free. I found this CodeProject article. Even if you can transform the image into a web-friendly format, your server-side code might have to cache the file on the web server.