ShinyImage | Image Sources

Uri is a single string property that covers five genuinely different places an image can come from. Only one of them involves any download machinery, so binding a local file costs nothing more than a plain Image would.

Form	Example	What happens
Remote	https://cdn.example.com/photo.jpg	Goes through IImageService — memory cache, disk cache, download queue, de-duplication
Embedded resource	resource://MyApp.Assets.logo.svg	Read out of an assembly’s manifest resources
Bundled asset	art/logo.svg	Read from the app package (MauiAsset on MAUI)
File on disk	/var/mobile/.../chart.svg	Read straight from the filesystem
Inline data	data:image/svg+xml;base64,…	Decoded in place, no I/O at all

The format is decided by the payload

Whether a source is a raster or a vector is worked out by looking at the bytes, not at the file extension. That matters more than it sounds: plenty of endpoints serve /avatar/1234 and pick a format by content negotiation, and plenty of CDNs put a cache-busting query string on the end of a name. Either would defeat an extension check.

The extension is still used as a hint on the local path — a .png on disk goes straight to the platform loader without ever being read into managed memory — but where the two disagree, the payload wins.

Remote

The only form that involves a download. Everything on Caching & ImageService applies, and it is the only form where the ring can show a real percentage.

<shiny:ShinyImage Uri="{Binding AvatarUrl}" Aspect="AspectFill" HeightRequest="120" />

Embedded resources — resource://

<shiny:ShinyImage Uri="resource://MyApp.Assets.logo.svg" />
<shiny:ShinyImage Uri="resource://MyLib/MyLib.Assets.logo.svg" />

Declare the file as an EmbeddedResource and, ideally, give it an explicit name so the URI does not depend on how MSBuild derives one from the folder:

<ItemGroup>
    <EmbeddedResource Include="Assets\logo.svg" LogicalName="MyApp.Assets.logo.svg" />
</ItemGroup>

Resolution order for an unqualified name:

1. the application’s own assembly
2. the entry assembly
3. every other loaded assembly

Within each, the manifest resource name is matched exactly, then by suffix — so resource://Assets.logo.svg finds MyApp.Assets.logo.svg. The suffix match is anchored on a dot, which is what stops logo.svg matching MyApp.Assets.company_logo.svg. Add an assembly name before a slash to skip the search entirely.

Resolutions are cached per URI, so the assembly walk happens once and not once per cell.

The name is not a URI authority

Everything after resource:// is taken verbatim. It is deliberately not parsed as a host, because a URI host is lower-cased and manifest resource names are case-sensitive — resource://MyApp.Assets.Logo.svg would silently become myapp.assets.logo.svg and never resolve.

Bundled assets and files

The same string covers both, and both are ordinary:

<shiny:ShinyImage Uri="art/logo.svg" />
<shiny:ShinyImage Uri="{Binding PickedFilePath}" />

A path that exists on disk is read from disk. Anything else is looked for in the app package — which on Android lives inside the APK and has no filesystem path at all, so it must be read through the asset manager rather than opened.

MauiImage vs MauiAsset for SVG

MAUI’s own MauiImage build step converts an SVG to PNG at build time and renames it, so logo.svg becomes logo.png in the package and is no longer a vector. To keep a real SVG for ShinyImage to draw, ship it as a MauiAsset (or an embedded resource) instead.

Data URIs

public string InlineSvgUri { get; } =
    "data:image/svg+xml," + Uri.EscapeDataString(
        """
        <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 64 64">
          <circle cx="32" cy="32" r="30" fill="#10B981" />
        </svg>
        """
    );

Both ;base64, and plain percent-encoded payloads are accepted. Percent-encoding is worth preferring for SVG — the markup stays readable in the source that carries it.

The explicit Source (MAUI)

Source takes a real ImageSource and, when set, wins over Uri and skips the service entirely. Use it for a stream you already hold, a font image, or anything else you have already resolved yourself. The loading and error states still work; they just resolve immediately.

<shiny:ShinyImage Source="{Binding AlreadyResolvedImage}" />

Blazor

Blazor takes a URL string and hands it to the browser, so resource:// has no meaning there — publish the file as a static web asset and reference it by path. data: URIs work as they do in any <img>.