how to reduce the bitmap memory usage byte count b

Question

Searched and only find solutions for scale the bitmap to reduce its dimensions and size. But I am looking for a way to reduce the bitmap's memory byte count and don't change its dimension.

The images are from remote sources, they are not in our control. , after save the images to device locally, they will be shown as thumbnail later. Noticed it frequently throws OOM exception. The first step was to scale down the bitmap to a smaller dimensions when loading from the file (such as 500x500, or 300x300), here has some suggestions, which helps a little bit. A closer look find the scale downed bitmap may still have large byte count (from a few hundreds k to over one meg).

Since for this case the bitmap with lower resolution in memory should be ok, so is there a way it can keep the bitmap's dimensions but reduce it memory byte count?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can read it in as RGB_565 instead of ARGB_8888, to reduce the bit depth from 4 bytes/pixel to 2 bytes/pixel. However, that's all you can do, as the memory footprint of a Bitmap is the number of pixels times the bit depth per pixel.