I have a complex program in which I have to first create, then use wrappers around bitmaps and send them across a lot of different classes. The problem in the end is deciding which classes should dispose the bitmaps. Most of the time the end classes don't know if they can indeed dispose the bitmap as the same bitmap can be used in several places. Also, I can't just copy the bitmaps because this is a kind of resource intensive algorithm and doing it would be dead slow.

I looked up on reflector for Image/Bitmap's implementations and they seem to use the Dispose Pattern. So, even if I don't call Dispose(), the CLR will eventually call it some other time.

Is it too bad if I just let the bitmaps be as they are, and let the finalizer take care of them?