Very much a newbie question here but I cannot find a clear answer on the net or in the books I have. I am designing an app to be compatible with all sizes of android devices and I want to display a images in my app. I understand that android automatically scales images to suit the resolution of the screen being displayed.
My question is what do I look for in the images I use? E.g. I have a picture that’s 2418 x 2192 @ 240dpi. As far as I can tell, this should be perfect for a larger screen such as a tablet. If I put this into the xhdpi image folder in my project will it be detected by other devices and scaled to suit their dimensions/resolutions? Do I have to create 3 different versions of this image in photoshop and put it into the relevant dpi folders?
I can’t find a nice beginners tutorial for this stuff so haven’t a clue what I’m doing!
This is the best place to start for multiple screen size support:
http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html
The short answer is, yes, you place the images in the different directories based on resolution and Android will select which image to use based on the device’s properties. You should make a smaller set of images, for example, for mdpi and hdpi. You don’t “have to” do that, and if you just place the image into drawable it can be scaled down, but that’s generally not the best way to go.