Chapter 6. Image Management

Nowadays, it is very hard to imagine an application without any kind of images. Images, and media in general, have become an essential part of our applications if we want to show appealing information. At the same time, images use a lot of resources, memory, and time to load, and so on. So, this is a relevant detail we have to take care when developing our application. Managing images in an inefficient way will prevent our application from running smoothly, and if we do not address memory constraints properly, our application will most probably crash. This is even more significant if we load user-generated images or images that come from sources out of our control. In addition, we always have to keep in mind that not everyone has the latest, most expensive Android smartphone on the market, and each smartphone will have different memory constraints.

To work these issues out, we will cover in this chapter how to cache images, both to local memory...