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.

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''' <summary>
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''' Function to download Image from website
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''' </summary>
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''' <param name="_URL">URL address to download image</param>
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''' <returns>Image</returns>
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Public Function DownloadImage(ByVal _URL As String) As Image
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Dim _tmpImage As Image = Nothing
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Try
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' Open a connection
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Dim _HttpWebRequest As System.Net.HttpWebRequest =
CType(System.Net.HttpWebRequest.Create(_URL), System.Net.HttpWebRequest)
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_HttpWebRequest.AllowWriteStreamBuffering = True
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' You can also specify additional header values like the user agent or the
referer: (Optional)
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_HttpWebRequest.UserAgent = "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT
5.1)"
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_HttpWebRequest.Referer = "http://www.google.com/"
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' set timeout for 20 seconds (Optional)
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_HttpWebRequest.Timeout = 20000
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' Request response:
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Dim _WebResponse As System.Net.WebResponse = _HttpWebRequest.GetResponse()
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' Open data stream:
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Dim _WebStream As System.IO.Stream = _WebResponse.GetResponseStream()
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' convert webstream to image
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_tmpImage = Image.FromStream(_WebStream)
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' Cleanup
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_WebResponse.Close()
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_WebResponse.Close()
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Catch _Exception As Exception
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' Error
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Console.WriteLine("Exception caught in process: {0}",
_Exception.ToString())
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Return Nothing
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End Try
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Return _tmpImage
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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.

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' Download web image
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Dim _Image As Image = Nothing
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_Image = DownloadImage("http://www.youdomain.com/sample-image.jpg")
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' check for valid image
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If _Image IsNot Nothing Then
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' show image in picturebox
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pictureBox1.Image = _Image
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' lets save image to disk
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 _Image.Save("C:\\sample-image.jpg")
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End If