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:
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Multithreading
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Lazy Loading
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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.