Question

I use the following function to retrieve a contact’s photo in Android where the person’s lookup key is given:

public Bitmap getContactPhoto(String lookup_key) {
    Uri lookUpUri = Uri.withAppendedPath(ContactsContract.Contacts.CONTENT_LOOKUP_URI, lookup_key);
    Uri contentUri = ContactsContract.Contacts.lookupContact(ctx.getContentResolver(), lookUpUri);
    InputStream stream = null;
    try {
        stream = ContactsContract.Contacts.openContactPhotoInputStream(ctx.getContentResolver(), contentUri);
    }
    catch (Exception e) {
    }
    if (stream != null) {
        return BitmapFactory.decodeStream(stream, null, bitmapOptions);
    }
    else {
        return null;
    }
}

When I display those contact photos in a list view, I sometimes read the following error in the developer console’s crash reports:

Caused by: java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: bitmap size exceeds VM budget(Heap Size=6023KB, Allocated=3002KB, Bitmap Size=27152KB)

Does this mean that my app may use about 3MB of heap but a single bitmap had roughly 27MB?

I read a lot of questions here on Stack Overflow concerning OutOfMemory error but it was mainly about:

• leaking contexts so that the garbage collector cannot free the resources
• huge bitmaps that need to be scaled

But how can I prevent the error in my case? Since I only get the contacts’ photos, I don’t know if I have huge bitmaps that must be scaled. And leaking a context doesn’t seem to be the case here.

This is how the images are displayed:

imageView.setVisibility(View.VISIBLE);
imageView.setBackgroundResource(R.drawable.background);
if (<BITMAP_OBJECT> != null) {
    imageView.setImageBitmap(<BITMAP_OBJECT>);
}
else {
    imageView.setImageBitmap(null);
}

Answer 1

When you are setting your Bitmap to an ImageView, try doing this:

Bitmap oldBitmap = ((BitmapDrawable) imageView.getDrawable()).getBitmap();
imageView.setImageDrawable(null);
oldBitmap.recycle();
imageView.setImageBitmap(newBitmap);

It may not complete get rid of the problem, but it certainly makes it happen much more rarely.