How to share image data between applications?

Question

I already have an application called "old" which renders an image in which the image data is stored in form of session, and I need to read that data from this existing "old" application to an application called "new".

How do I pass this data? Do I need to get the memory address of the session and pass it to my other application?

And even if I have the memory address how do I read the entire data? It has loads of data stored.

Named pipes and all the others create a link between two processes and when one process writes to a memory location the other process reads it.

But I have a memory address of one process as an input, isn't the only thing that I have to do is just read the data from that memory address from the other process?

Answer 1

You have quite a few options to communicating between two processes

• Save the data to a file and read if from the other application
• Use a named pipe to establish a connection
• Use a named shared memory created using win32 API calls
• Use a shared memory area within a DLL loaded from both applications

Answer 2

Given the leanings of your question, I would suggest @shoosh's named shared memory suggestion. I've used that before for images from cameras and such as well.

Answer 3

As you are using C++ I would strongly suggest that you take a look at Boost interprocess. It provides nice platform independent access to interprocess communication, where most of the tedious and error prone low level details are shielded from you.