When developing a mobile app, and letting the user take photos (That later will be shown in full size also) but are also viewed in the table views (mid size) and even in the Google maps pin title view, Should I create a thumbnail/s for every image the user take for the smaller ones? or should I just use the regular image?
I am asking because From the tutorials i saw, and as a web developer, all I could figure out is that when using a web service to get groups of small images you usually get the thumbnails first and only when needed get the Full size image.
But this is an embedded (I know it is not embedded, but i don’t have a better way to describe this) app, that all the data sits on the device, So there is no upload performance issues, just memory and processor time issues (loading to view the big HD photos that the cameras take today is very heavy I think.
Any way, What is best practice for this?
Thank you,
Erez
It’s all about memory usage balanced with performance. If you don’t create thumbnails for each photo, there are only so many photo you can hold in memory before you receive memory warnings or have your app terminated by the system (maybe only 6-8 full size UIImages). To avoid that, you might write the photos out to the file system and keep a reference to their location. But then your tableview scrolling will suffer as it attempts to read photos from the file system for display.
So the solution is to create thumbnails for each photo so that you can store a lot of them in memory without any troubles. Your tableview will perform well as the photos are quickly accessible from memory. You’ll also want to write the full size photos to the file system (and keep a reference to their location) to avoid having to store them in memory. When it’s time to display the full size image, retrieve it from the file system and store it in memory. When it’s no longer needed, release it.