The Mysterious Invalid Parameter Used Error

Recently I was trying to write a little C# function for cropping images. I expected it to be a quick 5 minute task but I ended up spending a huge amount of time getting it to work correctly. I kept getting a very stubborn and mysterious error - “Invalid Parameter Used” - whenever I tried to save my newly cropped image by doing bitmap.Save(). I tried various suggestions I found on forums and blogs to no avail.

Finally I figured out what the problem was. I was encapulatning the Bitmap and Graphics objects inside a “using” statement. So the Bitmap object was being prematurely disposed before I returned it back to the caller.

So in the end my solution looked like this. I just god rid of the “usings”.

public Bitmap CropImage(Image image, Rectangle cropRect)
{
    Bitmap bitmap = new Bitmap(cropRect.Width, cropRect.Height, PixelFormat.Format24bppRgb);
    bitmap.SetResolution(image.HorizontalResolution, image.VerticalResolution);
    Graphics graphics = Graphics.FromImage(bitmap);
    graphics.DrawImage(image, 0, 0, cropRect, GraphicsUnit.Pixel);
    return bitmap;
}

Usage -
Bitmap croppedBmp = CropImage(”~/uploads/test.jpg”, new Rectangle(x, y, width, height));
croppedBmp.Save();

Moral of the story: If you are getting this error while calling Bitmap.Save() then make sure you are not disposing your Bitmap object prematurely. Hope this helps.