Develop Reference

Android ImageView.setImage* vs. BitmapFactory.decode*

I'm currently facing several performance issues (out-of-memory) when handling a vast amount of bitmaps. As this is just a problem that can be fixed I'm wondering if anybody can explain me the difference in using the following methods.
If I only want to load an image into an ImageView I usually use:
imageView.setImageDrawable(getResources.getDrawable(R.drawable.id));
If I want to sample the drawable beforehand I usually use (here without sampling):
Bitmap bm = BitmapFactory.decodeResource(getResources(), R.drawable.id);
imageView.setImageBitmap(bm);
My question is related to performance optimisation. I'm wondering whether it is better to provide as many drawables as possible using the different drawable folders (so these drawables nearly fit the required resolution for the different devices) or if it is better to sample high-quality drawables? What is setImageDrawable doing internally? Does it decode the resources using the BitmapFactory, just without sampling? There seems to be a trade-off between the actual size of the app and the cpu- and memory-load during runtime.

if you're concerned about apk size, then having as many drawables as possible is not the ideal way to go. but dont forget, when you decode a bitmap, you can pass a sample size so it will scale down to the screen size and only give you the pixels you need, so older phones with smaller screens wont need to decode 8mp images.
check BitmapFactory.Options and here

Android Bitmap loosing image resolution

I am developing an application for android and it contains several images and I have to get them from drawable, so I am using bitmap for them to avoid out of memory exception by rescaling them, but the problem is when rescaling, the resolution (/quality) of the image is reduced. How can I overcome this problem?

You can keep a reference to the original byte array and check your bitmap size against it but I would just use pngs in the appropriate drawable folders. Rescaling/reloading the image yourself and checking for quality could be much more memory hungry in a garbage collected language.
Let android do it's thing..

The only way you can avoid the loss in quality is by scaling the image proportionately in terms of width and height.
For eg : if your resolution is 100x80 try reducing it to 5x:4x . That will somewhat preserve the quality.

Faster image processing

Can someone suggest me a library that can do simplest operations like scale, crop, rotate without loading image fully into memory?
The situation: I need to scale image down from a very large size, but the scaled down image is still too large to be allocated in memory (if we use standard android tools). Since I only need to upload scaled down version, I thought of scaling it through native library and upload it through FileInputStream.
I've tried to use ImageMagic and it does the job, but performance is very poor (maybe there is a way to speed things up?)

Might want to check out OpenCV for Android

You can use the original Android Bitmap functionality by pulling the image into memory but allowing Android to sample the image before it is loaded.
For example:
BitmapFactory.Options options = new BitmapFactory.Options();
options.inSampleSize = 2;
Bitmap myBitmap = BitmapFactory.decodeStream(inputstream,null,options);
This will load your bitmap into memory with half the memory footprint of the full image. You can experiment with changing the inSampleSize to get a good fit for your application.
You can also calculate the sample size on the fly, if you know the final image size you are aiming for, you can get the current file size of the image before you load it into memory and calculate the sample size using the equation inSampleSize = OriginalSize/RequiredSize. Though sample size is best used when it is a power of 2, so you can make adjustments for this.
Edit:
A great example here https://stackoverflow.com/a/823966/637545

Android Out Of Memory error with with images

For some reason I can not load any image that has more than 200 pixels in either width or height without getting a OOM error. To fix this I lowered the amount of pixels on my images but now they all look blurry. Does anyone know the best way to load higher quality images without getting this error. Also I have tried manually recycling my bitmaps but when doing so it seems to just give me the out of memory error no matter what size the images are.

The inSampleSize of the BitmapFactory.Options class can solve your issue, Try to see the officiel android docs Loading Large Bitmaps Efficiently and you will get it work.

Large source ImageView animation

What's the best image file format for Android in terms of memory? PNG is recommended for iOS as xCode does some magic with it.. Is it the same for Android?
I'm currently developing a big app with multiple animations going on (sliding in screens, fading etc etc). All works well so far! However I have noticed the view animation where the view contains an ImageView with a (quite large) PNG as the source is a bit laggy.
Obviously I can make the PNG smaller, but is there anything extra I can do to reduce the amount of memory the ImageView takes up/makes the animation smooth? I know PNG has a much larger file size than JPEG, but I can't see this being a problem, the JPEG or PNG (I assume) is eventually stored as an array of colours, so they would both take up the same memory. PNG is probably better for loading due to less cycles uncompressing. Again I only assume, my knowledge of image file formats is null.
Alternatively is there anything else causing the lag? Is the bitmap scaled to fit the view each onDraw() during the animation so should I scale the bitmap in code before giving it to the ImageView?
Thanks,

The formats supported by Android are: PNG, JPG and GIF (also 9.png).
The recomendated is PNG as said in dev guide
All of them are stored in memory as a Bitmap, so the most important thing is the color deph, like this:
BitmapFactory.Options options = new BitmapFactory.Options();
options.inPreferredConfig = Bitmap.Config.RGB_565;
Bitmap bitmap = BitmapFactory.decodeResource(getResources(), R.drawable.icon, options);
More info: stackoverflow

and add (after honeycomb):
<application
android:largeHeap="true"
...
to your manifest file :=)
thanks to my dear friend :)