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

Picasso

Use Jake Wharton's Picasso Library. (A Perfect ImageLoading Library form the developer of ActionBarSherlock)

A powerful image downloading and caching library for Android.

Images add much-needed context and visual flair to Android applications. Picasso allows for hassle-free image loading in your application—often in one line of code!

Picasso.with(context).load("http://i.imgur.com/DvpvklR.png").into(imageView);

Many common pitfalls of image loading on Android are handled automatically by Picasso:

Handling ImageView recycling and download cancellation in an adapter. Complex image transformations with minimal memory use. Automatic memory and disk caching.

Picasso Jake Wharton's Library

Glide

Glide is a fast and efficient open source media management framework for Android that wraps media decoding, memory and disk caching, and resource pooling into a simple and easy to use interface.

Glide supports fetching, decoding, and displaying video stills, images, and animated GIFs. Glide includes a flexible api that allows developers to plug in to almost any network stack. By default Glide uses a custom HttpUrlConnection based stack, but also includes utility libraries plug in to Google's Volley project or Square's OkHttp library instead.

Glide.with(this).load("http://goo.gl/h8qOq7").into(imageView);

Glide's primary focus is on making scrolling any kind of a list of images as smooth and fast as possible, but Glide is also effective for almost any case where you need to fetch, resize, and display a remote image.

Glide Image Loading Library

Fresco by Facebook

Fresco is a powerful system for displaying images in Android applications.

Fresco takes care of image loading and display, so you don't have to. It will load images from the network, local storage, or local resources, and display a placeholder until the image has arrived. It has two levels of cache; one in memory and another in internal storage.

Fresco Github

In Android 4.x and lower, Fresco puts images in a special region of Android memory. This lets your application run faster - and suffer the dreaded OutOfMemoryError much less often.

Fresco Documentation

Answer 2

High performance loader - after examining the methods suggested here, I used Ben's solution with some changes -

1. I realized that working with drawables is faster that with bitmaps so I uses drawables instead

2. Using SoftReference is great, but it makes the cached image to be deleted too often, so I added a Linked list that holds images references, preventing from the image to be deleted, until it reached a predefined size

3. To open the InputStream I used java.net.URLConnection which allows me to use web cache (you need to set a response cache first, but that's another story)

My code:

import java.util.Map; 
import java.util.HashMap; 
import java.util.LinkedList; 
import java.util.Collections; 
import java.util.WeakHashMap; 
import java.lang.ref.SoftReference; 
import java.util.concurrent.Executors; 
import java.util.concurrent.ExecutorService; 
import android.graphics.drawable.Drawable;
import android.widget.ImageView;
import android.os.Handler;
import android.os.Message;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.net.MalformedURLException; 
import java.io.IOException; 
import java.net.URL;
import java.net.URLConnection;

public class DrawableBackgroundDownloader {    

private final Map<String, SoftReference<Drawable>> mCache = new HashMap<String, SoftReference<Drawable>>();   
private final LinkedList <Drawable> mChacheController = new LinkedList <Drawable> ();
private ExecutorService mThreadPool;  
private final Map<ImageView, String> mImageViews = Collections.synchronizedMap(new WeakHashMap<ImageView, String>());  

public static int MAX_CACHE_SIZE = 80; 
public int THREAD_POOL_SIZE = 3;

/**
 * Constructor
 */
public DrawableBackgroundDownloader() {  
    mThreadPool = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(THREAD_POOL_SIZE);  
}  


/**
 * Clears all instance data and stops running threads
 */
public void Reset() {
    ExecutorService oldThreadPool = mThreadPool;
    mThreadPool = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(THREAD_POOL_SIZE);
    oldThreadPool.shutdownNow();

    mChacheController.clear();
    mCache.clear();
    mImageViews.clear();
}  

public void loadDrawable(final String url, final ImageView imageView,Drawable placeholder) {  
    mImageViews.put(imageView, url);  
    Drawable drawable = getDrawableFromCache(url);  

    // check in UI thread, so no concurrency issues  
    if (drawable != null) {  
        //Log.d(null, "Item loaded from mCache: " + url);  
        imageView.setImageDrawable(drawable);  
    } else {  
        imageView.setImageDrawable(placeholder);  
        queueJob(url, imageView, placeholder);  
    }  
} 


private Drawable getDrawableFromCache(String url) {  
    if (mCache.containsKey(url)) {  
        return mCache.get(url).get();  
    }  

    return null;  
}

private synchronized void putDrawableInCache(String url,Drawable drawable) {  
    int chacheControllerSize = mChacheController.size();
    if (chacheControllerSize > MAX_CACHE_SIZE) 
        mChacheController.subList(0, MAX_CACHE_SIZE/2).clear();

    mChacheController.addLast(drawable);
    mCache.put(url, new SoftReference<Drawable>(drawable));

}  

private void queueJob(final String url, final ImageView imageView,final Drawable placeholder) {  
    /* Create handler in UI thread. */  
    final Handler handler = new Handler() {  
        @Override  
        public void handleMessage(Message msg) {  
            String tag = mImageViews.get(imageView);  
            if (tag != null && tag.equals(url)) {
                if (imageView.isShown())
                    if (msg.obj != null) {
                        imageView.setImageDrawable((Drawable) msg.obj);  
                    } else {  
                        imageView.setImageDrawable(placeholder);  
                        //Log.d(null, "fail " + url);  
                    } 
            }  
        }  
    };  

    mThreadPool.submit(new Runnable() {  
        @Override  
        public void run() {  
            final Drawable bmp = downloadDrawable(url);
            // if the view is not visible anymore, the image will be ready for next time in cache
            if (imageView.isShown())
            {
                Message message = Message.obtain();  
                message.obj = bmp;
                //Log.d(null, "Item downloaded: " + url);  

                handler.sendMessage(message);
            }
        }  
    });  
}  



private Drawable downloadDrawable(String url) {  
    try {  
        InputStream is = getInputStream(url);

        Drawable drawable = Drawable.createFromStream(is, url);
        putDrawableInCache(url,drawable);  
        return drawable;  

    } catch (MalformedURLException e) {  
        e.printStackTrace();  
    } catch (IOException e) {  
        e.printStackTrace();  
    }  

    return null;  
}  


private InputStream getInputStream(String urlString) throws MalformedURLException, IOException {
    URL url = new URL(urlString);
    URLConnection connection;
    connection = url.openConnection();
    connection.setUseCaches(true); 
    connection.connect();
    InputStream response = connection.getInputStream();

    return response;
}
}

Answer 3

I recommend open source instrument Universal Image Loader. It is originally based on Fedor Vlasov's project LazyList and has been vastly improved since then.

• Multithread image loading
• Possibility of wide tuning ImageLoader's configuration (thread executors, downlaoder, decoder, memory and disc cache, display image options, and others)
• Possibility of image caching in memory and/or on device's file sysytem (or SD card)
• Possibility to "listen" loading process
• Possibility to customize every display image call with separated options
• Widget support
• Android 2.0+ support

Answer 4

Well, image loading time from the Internet has many solutions. You may also use the library Android-Query. It will give you all the required activity. Make sure what you want to do and read the library wiki page. And solve the image loading restriction.

This is my code:

@Override
public View getView(int position, View convertView, ViewGroup parent) {
    View v = convertView;
    if (v == null) {
        LayoutInflater vi = (LayoutInflater)getSystemService(Context.LAYOUT_INFLATER_SERVICE);
        v = vi.inflate(R.layout.row, null);
    }

    ImageView imageview = (ImageView) v.findViewById(R.id.icon);
    AQuery aq = new AQuery(convertView);

    String imageUrl = "http://www.vikispot.com/z/images/vikispot/android-w.png";

    aq.id(imageview).progress(this).image(imageUrl, true, true, 0, 0, new BitmapAjaxCallback() {
        @Override
        public void callback(String url, ImageView iv, Bitmap bm, AjaxStatus status) {
            iv.setImageBitmap(bm);
        }
    ));

    return v;
}

It should be solve your lazy loading problem.

Answer 5

Just a quick tip for someone who is in indecision regarding what library to use for lazy-loading images:

There are four basic ways.

1. DIY => Not the best solution but for a few images and if you want to go without the hassle of using others libraries

2. Volley's Lazy Loading library => From guys at android. It is nice and everything but is poorly documented and hence is a problem to use.

3. Picasso: A simple solution that just works, you can even specify the exact image size you want to bring in. It is very simple to use but might not be very "performant" for apps that has to deal with humongous amounts of images.

4. UIL: The best way to lazy load images. You can cache images(you need permission of course), initialize the loader once, then have your work done. The most mature asynchronous image loading library I have ever seen so far.

Answer 6

Use the glide library. It worked for me and will work for your code too.It works for both images as well as gifs too.

ImageView imageView = (ImageView) findViewById(R.id.test_image); 
    GlideDrawableImageViewTarget imagePreview = new GlideDrawableImageViewTarget(imageView);
    Glide
            .with(this)
            .load(url)
            .listener(new RequestListener<String, GlideDrawable>() {
                @Override
                public boolean onException(Exception e, String model, Target<GlideDrawable> target, boolean isFirstResource) {                       
                    return false;
                }

                @Override
                public boolean onResourceReady(GlideDrawable resource, String model, Target<GlideDrawable> target, boolean isFromMemoryCache, boolean isFirstResource) {
                    return false;
                }
            })
            .into(imagePreview);
}