Including thousands of images in Xamarin Forms application - android

I have a xamarin forms project for the company I work for. I have 6000+ images used in two ways : a thumbnail page and a full size page. I have both the thumbnail image and the full size image. The thumbnail page shows 12 products at a time, but it lives in a carousel page so it could have up to 18 content pages within the carousel.
I've tried three ways of saving/accessing the images:
Including them as bundle/android resources. This works the best but takes forever to build the project and on android will mean I have to use expansion files.
Included the binary image from the database when downloading the product listing. Causes the app to crash randomly on download.
Downloading all of the files from the web. This works, but on both Android and iOS, the thumbnail screen slows to a crawl and half of the time crashes on Android.
Has anyone had to do something similar and if so, what way did you decide to go? Unfortunately, this app does have to be usable offline so I need the images local. I'm kind of in a time crunch so any help would be appreciated!!

I had similar issues someday back and understood that it won't be successful with standard Image class with such a large amount of images (no memory caching, no task queueing, etc). Then I made CachedImage. It's basically an API compatible replacement for Image with advanced caching capabilities (and some other features). You could try that.
Just remember to use:
Downsampling feature : that way image would be resized to view size to save memory
Caching feature (it's enabled by default not including StreamImageSource for which you have to provide custom cache key factory)
Use FileImageSource (app dir) or StreamImageSource (eg. from image database) with custom cache keys
https://github.com/molinch/FFImageLoading (See WIKI for docs)

Related

Android image size reduction

I got an app which is loaded with many image files which takes much place. The app can also download more pictures from different sources. Is there a way to compress their size?
I remember there was maybe some sort of library created by Google specifically for this issue?

Android Programming Working with Lots of Images

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.
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.
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.

Preferred way to fetch/show images on Android?

Lets consider the following, I have an app with several dozen photos I want to show the user at any given time.
Right now I'm creating multiple files for each image, sizing them for different screen sizes and storing them in their respective drawable folders.
It's increasing the size of my app dramatically.
So here is my question: Is it possible to store the images on a server and use an image library like Picasso, Fresco or something else (open to anything) to fetch that image and scale it down for the device it's running on without risking running out of memory?
I'm worried that fetching a large image, loading it into memory and then resizing it will cause the same problem as trying to display it on older devices with little memory available to them.
You can write methods to request different images sizes from your server based on client info. Just write a method to measure the screen size and then request the appropriate image based on a URL endpoint (like http://myimageserver.com/images/ldpi/image1.png).
You can do optimization post-download, such as scaling, before saving the image to a local file store.
Using a reputable image loading library is a valid method (my own favourite is Glide).
The answer to your question really depends on the number of images you want to show! If there are lots, then yes storing them on a server is probably best, but also the most time-consuming and expensive (both in time and money).
Your other (easier) option is to keep the originals in the assets folder, and use your image loader to scale and load them for you. The correct path for an image in your assets folder is file:///android_asset/your_image_here.jpg. This way, you're only keeping one version of each photo in your apk and they'll load much faster.

Idea to download images in android

I'm making an android app, here the images are getting from Cloud, is it good idea to download images and save it & use it further. Or download images every-time user uses the app, what idea you prefer is the best?
Because downloading images always is slow & its bad i know but at some point if the images are updated then how to get to know about it?
You should definitely cache your downloaded files!
Do it in your internal app directory where only you do have access to (or otherwise external storage, thats still ok).
Bandwidth and connections are always expensive and should kept low as much as possible.
So your user can see images fast even on a bad connection and your app doesn't waste his valuable bandwidth of a users data plan.
Maybe this could also help you:
https://github.com/novoda/ImageLoader
http://www.androidhive.info/2012/07/android-loading-image-from-url-http/
Make it easy on yourself and use something like Android Smart Image View. It takes care of loading and caching, and it's just about a drop-in replacement for Android's ImageView. Universal Image Loader is another alternative, more configurable, but not as quick to implement.
I used https://github.com/nostra13/Android-Universal-Image-Loader
but I think you not want only download and cache.
these no trick ,if you want check weather the image update or not, you can add metadata for image, just like md5 .
in html and browser, you can set expires header for a image:
enter link description here
but in android app, you control all yourself.
Downloading images and saving them is probably the best way to do it because you don't want to download the same images over and over. If the images are updated you can delete the older one and download the new ones. Just make sure you don't download/save a million images. Take a look at this library. It has a built-in cache on sdcard/external sd.
Downloading images from the net for display, with possible requirement of caching is a very common problem that many people have solved, you can try these solutions to see which fits you:
Ion (https://github.com/koush/ion) - very flexible and feature complete, plus it can download more than images but JSON, Strings, Files, and Java types as well. The part that I really like about this is that it can automatically cancel operations when the calling Activity finishes, so users don't waste time & bandwidth downloading images that will no longer be displayed
Universal Image Loader (https://github.com/nostra13/Android-Universal-Image-Loader) - equally capable for most use cases but for downloading/caching images only

How to handle large images in android

i'm writing a simple application. i need to handle around 100 images having size dimension 1000*740. images are fixed no need to change. user will see this images like gallery view.
Problem
1.Large number of Images increases .apk filesize .It crosses memory limit(Given by Android market).
2.I placed these images in Drawable folder.Is there any other way to keep this images?
Any Idea?
YOu can host them on a separate site, but you do not have to download them every time. You can download them to an external directory (sd card) and just check if you've got everything you want when starting the app: If you do, you obviously don't have to re-download the shots again.
Is there a reason your images are of that size? If you compress them a bit you should be able to fit a photo in less then half an MB, and I think that the limit is 50mb on the market: You might be able to just squeeze it in.
Upload all the images to a link. Do parsing by using that link.
That's a pretty tough dilemma. Perhaps the user can download the images instead. You could use flickr to host the images.
I would suggest hosting them somewhere and download as "citizen conn" suggested.
Another possibility would be to separate in different sets and have different apk with those (maybe some of them would only have a content provider with some of those pictures). But that's kind of ugly...
Other than that, I don't think there is any way to get around the limit from Android market...

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