WPF Image element locks my local file

WPF Image element locks my local file

    When using the Image element and specifying a local resource Uri in the Source attribute that resource will be locked by your application's process.

<Image Source="C:\Image\Josh.png" />

The file can't be deleted or modified whilst it's locked and this can be a problem if the image was generated and the application wants to clean it up when the user has finished looking at it. There is a simple work around for this, specifying the BitmapImage directly and specifying the CacheOption as OnLoad:

<Image>
    <Image.Source>
        <BitmapImage UriSource="C:\Image\Josh.png" CacheOption="OnLoad" />
    </Image.Source>
</Image>

But

However, there is one big problem with this. The UriSource doesn't work with a binding, e.g.:

<Image>
    <Image.Source>
        <BitmapImage UriSource="{Binding MyImageUrl}" CacheOption="OnLoad" />
    </Image.Source>
</Image>

The good news is, there's another workaround for this by implementing an IValueConverter that returns a BitmapImage with the CacheOption set to OnLoad.

public class UriToCachedImageConverter : IValueConverter
{
    public object Convert(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture)
    {
        if (value == null)
            return null;

        if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(value.ToString()))
        {
            BitmapImage bi = new BitmapImage();
            bi.BeginInit();
            bi.UriSource = new Uri(value.ToString());
            bi.CacheOption = BitmapCacheOption.OnLoad;
            bi.EndInit();
            return bi;
        }

        return null;
    }

    public object ConvertBack(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture)
    {
        throw new NotImplementedException("Two way conversion is not supported.");
    }
}

Now we can go back to using the Image tag alone, and use our new converter to return a cached BitmapImage:

<Image Source="{Binding MyImageUrl, Converter={StaticResource uriToImageConv}}"/>

... where uriToImageConv is the key of a static resource of type UriToCachedImageConverter.

this article comes from http://thejoyofcode.com/WPF_Image_element_locks_my_local_file.aspx