C# Make one picture using various pictures

Question

Hi!

Imagine that I have a matrix of 2x2 or 3x3 pictures and I want to make one big picture using these 4 or 9 pictures. I want to show this picture on a pictureBox.

I'm developing a Windows Mobile App.

How can I do this?

Edit: Moved comments to question for clarification..

Normally you asing an image to a pictureBox like this pictureBox.image = myImage. I want to build myImage using 4 images. Imagine that I have a image and cut it out in four squared pieces. I want to use these 4 images to re-assamble the original one.

Thank you!

Answer 1

Either place 4 och 9 PictureBoxes next to each other or use a Panel instead of a PictureBox and draw all images in the Panles Paint event using Graphics.DrawImage.

Answer 2

Something like this:

Bitmap bitmap = new Bitmap(totalWidthOfAllImages, totalHeightOfAllImages);
using(Graphics g = Graphics.FromBitmap(bitmap))
{
    foreach(Bitmap b in myBitmaps)
        g.DrawImage(/* do positioning stuff based on image position */)
}

pictureBox1.Image = bitmap;

Answer 3

This should work, but is untested:

private Image BuildBitmap(Image[,] parts) {
    // assumes all images are of equal size, assumes arrays are 0-based
    int xCount = parts.GetUpperBound(0) + 1;
    int yCount = parts.GetUpperBound(0) + 1;

    if (xCount <= 0 || yCount <= 0)
        return null; // no images to join

    int width = parts[0,0].Width;
    int height = parts[0,0].Height;

    Bitmap newPicture = new Bitmap(width * xCount, height * yCount);
    using (Graphics g = Graphics.FromImage(newPicture)) {
        for (int x = 0; x < xCount; x++)
            for (int y = 0; y < yCount; y++)
                g.DrawImage(parts[x, y], x * width, y & height); 
    }

    return newPicture;
}