I've got a really simple (so far) Android app, which basically shows your friends on a Google Map. Think Latitude.
The friends are represented as avatar pins, the images of which are downloaded from the internet.
When a "friend" is added, i fetch the avatar in a background thread. I then don't need to download the avatar again (i'll probably check for updates during app start, but not too fussed about that right now). The actual images will most likely come from a social network (Facebook, Google, Twitter, Gravatar, etc)
Now, the map view will basically always be displayed, so the images are essentially always present. I will however be performing image manupilation, stacking, etc for these avatars.
Given the above information, here are my questions:
Where should i cache these images? Looking at the docs, i feel like a Disk Cache would be the best option?
Should i think about creating an image sprite? Remember, these images don't live in the APK/resources, they are dynamically fetched. Perhaps i could create a per-friend sprite with all the different image sizes i will require?
I also have access to the server which returns these images (right now they just return a URL) - so should i enable this server to instead do image processing/resizing etc based on my requirements, or simply download the original image and then perform the processing on my client application?
You can use lazy loading to dynamically download the users images from the URl and store it in cache. I believe this link would help you out in this :
https://github.com/thest1/LazyList
Related
What am I trying to achieve: Based on some filters by the app user, I want to return a list with text and images.
How am I doing it: I have created a table in Parse and have added a column with object type as 'file'. I have put all the jpg/gif images into that column. (double-click, browse, select image from local computer).
The trouble I am having is, the list takes considerable time (~7 seconds) before it is displayed on my android app.
Is there a better way of handling image data within Parse or should I store images somewhere else (like Amazon S3)?
I am using standard queries for Parse in order to get data, nevertheless, am also checking if there is any code latency. Wanted to confirm if I am correctly handling the image data for back-end or not.
Is there a better way of handling image data within Parse or should I
store images somewhere else (like Amazon S3)?
If your images is not too much or you are using for example(five image) its better to save the into the Assets or Drawable Folder for loading.
and if i correctly knows about this problem, you need to use ProgressBar and one image, before loading the Images in Internet.
Caching images and displaying
Hope this helps.
I am using Parse to store images too, but it's not slow as you said. Since Parse is part of Facebook, I think their infrastructure is the same. There are possible issues:
Internet connection: Slow or on 3G?
Images: files are big?
Let me know which case you are in.
If you just display thumbnail images, I suggest you to process it before saving to Parse by writing Cloud function as describe on their blog. The you just need to use generated thumbnails on your listview/gridview
I'm trying to create a CRUD android application.
Now, when the List Activity is shown, it will display the items created along with a thumbnail of the original image.
What is the best practice for displaying a thumbnail in an Android application with Volley? Should I generate a thumbnail for the images uploaded or just re-size the image at the client side?
It's hard to come up with a general answer for this questions because it all depends on how many images you're trying to download and how important showing the thumbnails is.
I would personally generate the thumbnails on the server side as soon as they are uploaded by the user. Doing this has several advantages:
All your app has to do is request the thumbnail and render it, which is much simpler and less CPU-intensive than using Volley's ImageRequest.
Smaller images means less data usage. You definitely don't want your app to download a 10MB 25-megapixel image over a 3G connection just to shrink it to a 100x100 thumbnail that the user might not even care about.
The only drawback that I can think of is that you might have to generate multiple thumbnails, one for each screen size (e.g. one for hdpi screens and another for xxhdpi). This is slightly more expensive on the server side but might make your UI look much better.
Also, remember to cache thumbnails in your app's cache directory so you don't have to re-request them every single time you want to show them.
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
My Problem deals with Memory, I have a Web service that provide me a List of Urls. Each URL corresponds to a large image. My Mobile app have to parse the xml provided by the web service and than show in a GridView these images. I tried several features in order to display images such as:
Multithreading
Lazy Loading
Reduce image size using inSampleSize ( this causes my app takes too long)
should i have to attach for each large image a thumbnail image, and make the web service return to me the list of all thumbnails, after that show these thumbnail to the user, and if he clicks on one of them than i have to show the large image in a separate view, i have this idea because i noticed when i show one image i don't get an outofMemory exception!!
Is this a reliable solution? is there a better way?
Welcome to one of the hardest issues on Android. First I would start by reading this new documentation google wrote on how to handle bitmaps. Its not a light read, but you probably need to read it all the way through. It has only been up for a few weeks so you may not have seen it. It details many of the things you mentioned such as multithreading, lazy loading, and down sampling. They also recommend using an image cache.
Downloading the large images for each image and then down sampling is going to be very inefficient. First the download size is larger than needed. Second you need to load it into memory to perform the down sample and third down sampling is somewhat slow.
I would have the web api return you a list of thumbnail urls and full image urls that you can lazy download as the view comes on screen and use the cache to keep them around a while. Make sure you down sample the sizes of the thumbnails as well. I would then when the user clicks on an image go download the full image and on the background when it arrives down sample it before displaying it.
I'm looking for a quick way of getting all my friends's profile pictures.
I'm using the Facebook SDK for Android.
right now I'm getting my friend's list JSON object and running with a for loop inside this object.
in the loop i'm putting each image in a Drawable object from the: http://graph.facebook.com/uid/picture.
I've seen that each picture weight only 4K and it goes fast for few friends.
but what if I have 1000 friends and i'm connecting to facebook for each one of them?
it will take lots of time.
I've seen in other application that some of them show all your friend real quick.
what is the best way of doing it? using the runner?
If each picture is 4K and you have 1000 friends, that's approximately 4MB of data. It'll take time to download it. There's no way around it if you need all of their pictures.
That said, you should think about whether you really need all of their pictures or not. The vast majority of apps will use the profile pictures of friends to display to the user. Reasonably speaking, the interface is not going to display 1000 friends all at once. A good solution in this case might be to lazy load the images, i.e. store the URL of the image when you parse the JSON for each friend, but don't download the actual images until you need them. If say your interface shows 10 friends at once, then that's only 40K of images which is a whole lot more reasonable.
You can search StackOverflow for android lazy load list images but here's one particular thread that may come useful: Lazy load of images in ListView.