Best approach to download image - image

Question

I have a simple site (WebAPI) that returns a bunch of albums in the get method. Each album has attributes such as title, artist and so on. The attribute under here is the image (album photo) attribute. Each album has an image, what is the best way to send the image back to client. Should it be sent as binary data as part of the album object for example like
Public Class Album
{
string title;
byte[] image;
}
Or should I send the path to the image in the Album object and have the client download the image separately?
Like
Public Class Album
{
string title;
string imagePath;
}

Answer 1

You can see this post The downloaded file as stream in controller (ASP.NET MVC 3) will automatically disposed? as reference.
You can use FileStream.
protected override void WriteFile(HttpResponseBase response) {
// grab chunks of data and write to the output stream
Stream outputStream = response.OutputStream;
using (FileStream) {
byte[] buffer = new byte[_bufferSize];
while (true) {
int bytesRead = FileStream.Read(buffer, 0, _bufferSize);
if (bytesRead == 0) {
// no more data
break;
}
outputStream.Write(buffer, 0, bytesRead);
}
}
}

Answer 2

Instead of passing
Public class Album
{
string title;
byte[] image;
}
back to the client, I would change image to a int imageId:
Public class Album
{
string Title{get;set};
int ImageId{get;set};
}
Then create a WebApi controller that handles images with a method written like this:
public async Task<HttpResponseMessage> Get(HttpRequestMessage request, int imageId)
{
byte[] img = await _myRepo.GetImgAsync(imageId);
HttpResponseMessage msg = new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.OK)
{
Content = new ByteArrayContent(img)
};
msg.Content.Headers.ContentType = new MediaTypeHeaderValue("image/png");
return msg;
}