Hey all, right now I have a drawable-hdpi, drawable-mdpi, drawable-ldpi folder inside my res directory... I hear that android now filters out applications based on screen size and density. All of my images are inside the drawable-hdpi folder. Should I make just 1 folder called "drawable" and delete the other 3? Or should I convert all the images to the proper size and place them inside all three folders?
Leave the folders as they are and put your medium density images in drawable-mdpi and hign density images in drawable-hdpi folder. I would leave the small density screens and let android scale them. But if you are worried about small density then put those in the drawable-ldpi directory too.
There are only a very few devices that support small screens.
Now for supporting multiple screens you need to make some changes in your manifest. Here is the explanation of what developers need to do to support multiple screens.
A note of caution if you are supporting 1.5 devices. In this case put all the images in your drawable-mdpi into drawable folder. That is because 1.5 devices do not support multiple screens and they recognize images in drawable folder.
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There are multiple groups of screen densities of Android phones (ldpi, mdpi, hdpi and so on).
I had a folder "drawable" with picture size 1920 x 930 pixels which is for xxxhdpi, I guess.
I want to arrange pictures for all screen densities from xxxhdpi to hdpi. So, I should rename my existing folder: "drawable" -> "drawable-xxxhdpi". Then, I should create 3 additional folders for others. Do I understand it right?
How would actually the program choose proper folder?
For example, I also have smaller pictures now. Should I also resize them? If I don't duplicate them in new folder, will the program crash?
Will the program crash on phones with, for example, hdpi if I don't create a folder for hdpi?
Couldn't get how it works, would be grateful for an explanation.
First of all be sure that you are in the "Project" view because you will not see all the folders if you are in "Android" view. Then instead of renaming drawable folder create the others and keep drawable for some files that doesn't need to resize (for example defining a background). Folders should be:
drawable-hdpi
drawable-mdpi
drawable-xhdpi
drawable-xxhdpi
drawable-xxxhdpi
Selection between them will be done automatically according to the screen of the device you are installing the app. If screen is xxxhdpi and you don't have a file for that resolution the app will take the smaller and so on. Obviously this will not be a great UI performance but you should not have problems with crashes.
There are many online App icons generators in the web so you can take a big icon and put it there so you get the icons for all sizes
I want my app to be as lightweight as possible. So i put all my images inside drawable-xxhdpi and let the Android OS to resize them.
However for the 10 inch mdpi tablets i want to use hdpi images. I know, that it is possible to create drawable-sw720dp-mdpi and put there hdpi images. But this will increase apk size, which is not the option. So, is it possible to make such a change without making drawable copies?
create a drawable folder in res folder of project and paste all images there...it will resize all images according to device size
Let's say you have a set of resources called icon_text.png; and you place one in the drawable-xxhdpi folder and another one in drawable-hdpi folder. That is your scenario, right? Any device that is mdpi (it doesn't matter its size) will pull resources (if available) from the hdpi folder. The system will pick the closest match, and mdpi is closer to hdpi than to xxhdpi.
Simple question. How does android work with drawable folders if any folders are empty ? Lets say I have images only in folder "drawable-hdpi". When I start application on emulator with higher dpi "drawable-xhdpi" it load images from "drawable-hdpi" (of course in bad size). Also when I start application on device with lower dpi "drawable-mdpi" it load images from "drawable-hdpi".
My question is - does it mean if doesn't exist images for current device dpi, android system takes images from other folder it is not empty ? Till today I thought, when images in current dpi are not present, application doesnt work.
It takes the near dpi, and scales the image up or down by the dpi difference between the target dpi and the folder dpi. If in the "drawale" folder (no dpi), no scaling takes place.
http://developer.android.com/training/basics/supporting-devices/screens.html
Note: Low-density (ldpi) resources aren’t always necessary. When you provide hdpi assets, the system scales them down by one half to properly fit ldpi screens.
It works. It first check in the current dpi folder for the resources. If not found then it use other available resources
I am new to android and this concept of multiple resources is killing me and its Halloween =)
Ok so for Normal screen we have following HDPI per http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html#range
WVGA800 (480x800)
WVGA854 (480x854)
600x1024
so my image will go in drawable-hdpi. should image be 480x800, 480x854, 600x1024, or all 3 in the drawable-hdpi?
If all 3 are doing to be in drawable-hdpi, how I will name them? They can't have same names.
Thank you in advance
The common drawable folders are drawable-hdpi,drawable-mdpi,drawable-ldpi.
These folders are used to tell android which set of image to use on different situations.
The different names that can be used are given here.
When a small ldpi phone is being used and it tries to refer an image named icon.png. It first refers the drawable-ldpi folder. If it doesn't find it there, it moves to the other folders till it finds the image. But if the phone was an hdpi device, android would first look into the drawable-hdpi folder. So if icon should be of different sizes, you put the different sized image in each folder with the same name. And android will decide which folder to access the image in run time.
This might be a bit confusing in the beginning but you will get used to it after a while.
My project contains three drawable's folders: drawable-hdpi, drawable-mdpi and drawable. I build it with android:minSdkVersion="3". When it runs on Andriod 1.6 or higher it always uses images from drawable-mdpi on high density screens.
How to fix this?
Have you tried setting android:anyDensity="true"?
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/supports-screens-element.html