How to lazy load images in ListView in Android

Question

I am using a ListView to display some images and captions associated with those images. I am getting the images from the Internet. Is there a way to lazy load images so while the text displays, the UI is not blocked and images are displayed as they are downloaded?

The total number of images is not fixed.

Answer 1

If you want to display Shimmer layout like Facebook there is a official facebook library for that. FaceBook Shimmer Android

It takes care of everything, You just need to put your desired design code in nested manner in shimmer frame. Here is a sample code.

<com.facebook.shimmer.ShimmerFrameLayout
     android:id=“@+id/shimmer_view_container”
     android:layout_width=“wrap_content”
     android:layout_height="wrap_content"
     shimmer:duration="1000">

 <here will be your content to display />

</com.facebook.shimmer.ShimmerFrameLayout>

And here is the java code for it.

ShimmerFrameLayout shimmerContainer = (ShimmerFrameLayout) findViewById(R.id.shimmer_view_container);
shimmerContainer.startShimmerAnimation();

Add this dependency in your gradle file.

implementation 'com.facebook.shimmer:shimmer:0.1.0@aar'

Here is how it looks like.

Answer 2

I made a simple demo of a lazy list (located at GitHub) with images.

Basic Usage

ImageLoader imageLoader=new ImageLoader(context); ...
imageLoader.DisplayImage(url, imageView); 

Don't forget to add the following permissions to your AndroidManifest.xml:

 <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET"/>
 <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE"/> Please

create only one instance of ImageLoader and reuse it all around your application. This way image caching will be much more efficient.

It may be helpful to somebody. It downloads images in the background thread. Images are being cached on an SD card and in memory. The cache implementation is very simple and is just enough for the demo. I decode images with inSampleSize to reduce memory consumption. I also try to handle recycled views correctly.

Answer 3

Novoda also has a great lazy image loading library and many apps like Songkick, Podio, SecretDJ and ImageSearch use their library.

Their library is hosted here on Github and they have a pretty active issues tracker as well. Their project seems to be pretty active too, with over 300+ commits at the time of writing this reply.

Answer 4

I have been using NetworkImageView from the new Android Volley Library com.android.volley.toolbox.NetworkImageView, and it seems to be working pretty well. Apparently, this is the same view that is used in Google Play and other new Google applications. Definitely worth checking out.

• Google I/O 2013 volley image cache tutorial

• Developers Google events

Answer 5

Update: Note that this answer is pretty ineffective now. The Garbage Collector acts aggressively on SoftReference and WeakReference, so this code is NOT suitable for new apps. (Instead, try libraries like Universal Image Loader suggested in other answers.)

Thanks to James for the code, and Bao-Long for the suggestion of using SoftReference. I implemented the SoftReference changes on James' code. Unfortunately SoftReferences caused my images to be garbage collected too quickly. In my case it was fine without the SoftReference stuff, because my list size is limited and my images are small.

There's a discussion from a year ago regarding the SoftReferences on google groups: link to thread. As a solution to the too-early garbage collection, they suggest the possibility of manually setting the VM heap size using dalvik.system.VMRuntime.setMinimumHeapSize(), which is not very attractive to me.

public DrawableManager() {
    drawableMap = new HashMap<String, SoftReference<Drawable>>();
}

public Drawable fetchDrawable(String urlString) {
    SoftReference<Drawable> drawableRef = drawableMap.get(urlString);
    if (drawableRef != null) {
        Drawable drawable = drawableRef.get();
        if (drawable != null)
            return drawable;
        // Reference has expired so remove the key from drawableMap
        drawableMap.remove(urlString);
    }

    if (Constants.LOGGING) Log.d(this.getClass().getSimpleName(), "image url:" + urlString);
    try {
        InputStream is = fetch(urlString);
        Drawable drawable = Drawable.createFromStream(is, "src");
        drawableRef = new SoftReference<Drawable>(drawable);
        drawableMap.put(urlString, drawableRef);
        if (Constants.LOGGING) Log.d(this.getClass().getSimpleName(), "got a thumbnail drawable: " + drawable.getBounds() + ", "
                + drawable.getIntrinsicHeight() + "," + drawable.getIntrinsicWidth() + ", "
                + drawable.getMinimumHeight() + "," + drawable.getMinimumWidth());
        return drawableRef.get();
    } catch (MalformedURLException e) {
        if (Constants.LOGGING) Log.e(this.getClass().getSimpleName(), "fetchDrawable failed", e);
        return null;
    } catch (IOException e) {
        if (Constants.LOGGING) Log.e(this.getClass().getSimpleName(), "fetchDrawable failed", e);
        return null;
    }
}

public void fetchDrawableOnThread(final String urlString, final ImageView imageView) {
    SoftReference<Drawable> drawableRef = drawableMap.get(urlString);
    if (drawableRef != null) {
        Drawable drawable = drawableRef.get();
        if (drawable != null) {
            imageView.setImageDrawable(drawableRef.get());
            return;
        }
        // Reference has expired so remove the key from drawableMap
        drawableMap.remove(urlString);
    }

    final Handler handler = new Handler() {
        @Override
        public void handleMessage(Message message) {
            imageView.setImageDrawable((Drawable) message.obj);
        }
    };

    Thread thread = new Thread() {
        @Override
        public void run() {
            //TODO : set imageView to a "pending" image
            Drawable drawable = fetchDrawable(urlString);
            Message message = handler.obtainMessage(1, drawable);
            handler.sendMessage(message);
        }
    };
    thread.start();
}

Answer 6

Have a look at Shutterbug, Applidium's lightweight SDWebImage (a nice library on iOS) port to Android. It supports asynchronous caching, stores failed URLs, handles concurrency well, and helpful subclasses are included.

Pull requests (and bug reports) are welcome, too!