Android pre-honeycomb bitmap management

Question

For my application I need to load a bitmap which sometimes can be really large. I'm getting OutOfMemory errors even on devices like galaxy S2. I searched around and found that I need to recycle the bitmap.

Previously I was loading the bitmap with BitmapFactory, creating a new scaled bitmap, and creating a bitmapdrawable all in one line. By doing this am I loading two bitmaps into memory? Should I create the initial bitmap and then recycle it after creating the scaled bitmap?

If the activity will be launched frequently should I load the bitmap once to a static field or should I recycle and recreate every time?

Thanks

Answer 1

Split the process into multiple steps. If you are measuring the bitmap against the available screen space and then loading a scaled bitmap, you can do the first step without loading the bitmap into memory using BitmapFactory.Options.inJustDecodeBounds. This will give you a Bitmap object without the pixel data but with the width and height properties. Then use that to decode your scaled bitmap using BitmapFactory.Options.inSampleSize.

Google these terms and you'll find tons of sample code doing just this. And yes, don't forget to recycle when you're done with a Bitmap.

https://www.google.com/#q=BitmapFactory+Options+inJustDecodeBounds+inSampleSize