Your best bet as always is to find a well tested library. However, you said that is difficult, so here is some dodgy largely untested code that should work for a fair number of cases:
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Drawing;
using System.IO;
using System.Linq;
namespace ImageDimensions
{
public static class ImageHelper
{
const string errorMessage = "Could not recognize image format.";
private static Dictionary<byte[], Func<BinaryReader, Size>> imageFormatDecoders = new Dictionary<byte[], Func<BinaryReader, Size>>()
{
{ new byte[]{ 0x42, 0x4D }, DecodeBitmap},
{ new byte[]{ 0x47, 0x49, 0x46, 0x38, 0x37, 0x61 }, DecodeGif },
{ new byte[]{ 0x47, 0x49, 0x46, 0x38, 0x39, 0x61 }, DecodeGif },
{ new byte[]{ 0x89, 0x50, 0x4E, 0x47, 0x0D, 0x0A, 0x1A, 0x0A }, DecodePng },
{ new byte[]{ 0xff, 0xd8 }, DecodeJfif },
};
/// <summary>
/// Gets the dimensions of an image.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="path">The path of the image to get the dimensions of.</param>
/// <returns>The dimensions of the specified image.</returns>
/// <exception cref="ArgumentException">The image was of an unrecognized format.</exception>
public static Size GetDimensions(string path)
{
using (BinaryReader binaryReader = new BinaryReader(File.OpenRead(path)))
{
try
{
return GetDimensions(binaryReader);
}
catch (ArgumentException e)
{
if (e.Message.StartsWith(errorMessage))
{
throw new ArgumentException(errorMessage, "path", e);
}
else
{
throw e;
}
}
}
}
/// <summary>
/// Gets the dimensions of an image.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="path">The path of the image to get the dimensions of.</param>
/// <returns>The dimensions of the specified image.</returns>
/// <exception cref="ArgumentException">The image was of an unrecognized format.</exception>
public static Size GetDimensions(BinaryReader binaryReader)
{
int maxMagicBytesLength = imageFormatDecoders.Keys.OrderByDescending(x => x.Length).First().Length;
byte[] magicBytes = new byte[maxMagicBytesLength];
for (int i = 0; i < maxMagicBytesLength; i += 1)
{
magicBytes[i] = binaryReader.ReadByte();
foreach(var kvPair in imageFormatDecoders)
{
if (magicBytes.StartsWith(kvPair.Key))
{
return kvPair.Value(binaryReader);
}
}
}
throw new ArgumentException(errorMessage, "binaryReader");
}
private static bool StartsWith(this byte[] thisBytes, byte[] thatBytes)
{
for(int i = 0; i < thatBytes.Length; i+= 1)
{
if (thisBytes[i] != thatBytes[i])
{
return false;
}
}
return true;
}
private static short ReadLittleEndianInt16(this BinaryReader binaryReader)
{
byte[] bytes = new byte[sizeof(short)];
for (int i = 0; i < sizeof(short); i += 1)
{
bytes[sizeof(short) - 1 - i] = binaryReader.ReadByte();
}
return BitConverter.ToInt16(bytes, 0);
}
private static int ReadLittleEndianInt32(this BinaryReader binaryReader)
{
byte[] bytes = new byte[sizeof(int)];
for (int i = 0; i < sizeof(int); i += 1)
{
bytes[sizeof(int) - 1 - i] = binaryReader.ReadByte();
}
return BitConverter.ToInt32(bytes, 0);
}
private static Size DecodeBitmap(BinaryReader binaryReader)
{
binaryReader.ReadBytes(16);
int width = binaryReader.ReadInt32();
int height = binaryReader.ReadInt32();
return new Size(width, height);
}
private static Size DecodeGif(BinaryReader binaryReader)
{
int width = binaryReader.ReadInt16();
int height = binaryReader.ReadInt16();
return new Size(width, height);
}
private static Size DecodePng(BinaryReader binaryReader)
{
binaryReader.ReadBytes(8);
int width = binaryReader.ReadLittleEndianInt32();
int height = binaryReader.ReadLittleEndianInt32();
return new Size(width, height);
}
private static Size DecodeJfif(BinaryReader binaryReader)
{
while (binaryReader.ReadByte() == 0xff)
{
byte marker = binaryReader.ReadByte();
short chunkLength = binaryReader.ReadLittleEndianInt16();
if (marker == 0xc0)
{
binaryReader.ReadByte();
int height = binaryReader.ReadLittleEndianInt16();
int width = binaryReader.ReadLittleEndianInt16();
return new Size(width, height);
}
binaryReader.ReadBytes(chunkLength - 2);
}
throw new ArgumentException(errorMessage);
}
}
}
Hopefully the code is fairly obvious. To add a new file format you add it to imageFormatDecoders
with the key being an array of the "magic bits" which appear at the beginning of every file of the given format and the value being a function which extracts the size from the stream. Most formats are simple enough, the only real stinker is jpeg.
Best Answer
The
file
command prints the dimensions for several image formats (e.g. PNG, GIF, JPEG; recent versions also PPM, WEBP), and does only read the header.The
identify
command (from ImageMagick) prints lots of image information for a wide variety of images. It seems to restrain itself to reading the header portion (see comments). It also uses a unified format whichfile
sadly lacks.exiv2
gives you dimensions for many formats, including JPEG, TIFF, PNG, GIF, WEBP, even if no EXIF header present. It is unclear if it reads the whole data for that though. See the manpage of exiv2 for all supported image formats.head -n1
will give you the dimensions for PPM, PGM formats.For formats popular on the web, both
exiv2
andidentify
will do the job. Depending on the use-case you may need to write your own script that combines/parses outputs of several tools.