Android Programming Working with Lots of Images

Question

Newbie in Android Development. Just looking for suggestions. I want to develop an android app which will display lots of images to user (upon clicks or swipe). In other words user should be able to browse lots of images which are provide by the app (not on the user phone). An example would be existing android app for inspirational quotes etc.

I wonder where all those images would be saved at the developers end? What would be the fastest way to allow user to browse these images? Are there any online example/tutorial for this?

I saw few tutorials but they were only for 5-6 images, but what I need to provide user is 500-1000 images or even more (will be adding if the app is successful).

Any pointers would be highly appreciated.

Answer 1

Possible ways are

• To store those images on server and load it from Server URL.

And you can use Picasso to load those images with following code

com.squareup.picasso.Picasso.with(context).
    load(imaegPath).
    placeholder(R.mipmap.ic_launcher).
    into(imageView);

here imagePath is the URL of image.

For more details on Picasso read this answer

But for that you need internet connection.

NOTE : This may not be the fastest way to load images as it depends on internet connection.

• You can store images in resources directory and load the images. imageview.setImageResource(R.id.image1);

But if images size is large, your app size will be accordingly.

Answer 2

It seems that you need large size of memory, and strategy for control that.

First , I suggest you to get your memory class. memoryClass shows you how much memory your app can use. With this value, you can determine your image cache amount.

ActivityManager am = (ActivityManager) getSystemService(ACTIVITY_SERVICE);
int memoryClass = am.getMemoryClass();
Log.v("onCreate", "memoryClass:" + Integer.toString(memoryClass));

See Also: Detect application heap size in Android

Second , ImageView of Android 2.2 and 2.3 has memory leak. (Well, these versions are now very old and hard to find)

Android bitmap imageview memory leak

You can download this example: https://github.com/StanleyKou/GettyImageViewer
In this example, you can see how to use picasso library with many images from website.