Working with images

ImageSharp is a third-party cross-platform 2D graphics library. When .NET Core 1.0 was in development, there was negative feedback from the community about the missing System.Drawing namespace for working with 2D images. The ImageSharp project was started to fill that gap for modern .NET applications.

In their official documentation for System.Drawing, Microsoft says, “The System.Drawing namespace is not recommended for new development due to not being supported within a Windows or ASP.NET service, and it is not cross-platform. ImageSharp and SkiaSharp are recommended as alternatives.”

Six Labors released ImageSharp 3.0 in March 2023. It now requires .NET 6 or later and major future versions will target LTS releases of .NET, like .NET 8. You can read the announcement at the following link: https://sixlabors.com/posts/announcing-imagesharp-300/.

Generating grayscale thumbnails

Let’s see what can be achieved with ImageSharp...