<p>What is the best way to create a webservice for accepting an image.
The image might be quite big and I do not want to change the default receive size for the web application.
I have written one that accepts a binary image but that I feel that there has to be a better alternative.</p>

Where does this image "live?" Is it accessible in the local file system or on the web? If so, I would suggest having your WebService accepting a URI (can be a URL or a local file) and opening it as a Stream, then using a StreamReader to read the contents of it.
Example (but wrap the exceptions in FaultExceptions, and add FaultContractAttributes):
```
```
using System.Drawing;
using System.IO;
using System.Net;
using System.Net.Sockets;

[OperationContract]
public void FetchImage(Uri url)
{
    // Validate url

    if (url == null)
    {
        throw new ArgumentNullException(url);
    }

    // If the service doesn't know how to resolve relative URI paths

    /*if (!uri.IsAbsoluteUri)
    {
        throw new ArgumentException("Must be absolute.", url);
    }*/

    // Download and load the image

    Image image = new Func<Bitmap>(() =>
    {
        try
        {
            using (WebClient downloader = new WebClient())
            {
                return new Bitmap(downloader.OpenRead(url));
            }
        }
        catch (ArgumentException exception)
        {
            throw new ResourceNotImageException(url, exception);
        }
        catch (WebException exception)
        {
            throw new ImageDownloadFailedException(url, exception);
        }

        // IOException and SocketException are not wrapped by WebException :(            

        catch (IOException exception)
        {
            throw new ImageDownloadFailedException(url, exception);
        }
        catch (SocketException exception)
        {
            throw new ImageDownloadFailedException(url, exception);
        }
    })();

    // Do something with image

}
```
```