Xamarin native apps + PCL: Share images in PCL project

Question

I'm developing an app for multiple platforms using Xamarin. Shared code is hosted in a separate PCL project. The project contains a large collection of images, which I would also like to share via the PCL project.

Is that possible? How can I access the image data from my platform-specific projects?

Answer 1

What I finally did (until now, I could only verify on an iOS and Droid project, Windows Phone is still in the works):

I return the image data from my shared project as Stream, as in:

public Stream GetImageStream () {
    return assembly.GetManifestResourceStream (nameOfResource);
}

Images' properties are set to EmbeddedResource. In my iOS project, I can then access my image like so:

using (var stream = myClass.GetImageStream ()) {
    var image = new UIImage (NSData.FromStream (stream));
    // do stuff with image
}

And on Android I use the following code:

using (var stream = myClass.GetImageStream ()) {
    var bitmap = BitmapFactory.DecodeStream (stream);
    // do stuff with bitmap
}

Feedback whether there any gotchas with this practice are welcome! (beside the obvious sizing-issue, which I can live with for now, I could imagine that this approach circumvents any platform-specific caching mechanisms?)