Giant online image gallery - How do I avoid OutOfMemoryError?

For anyone who's wondering, the gallery is http://www.spore.com/sporepedia.

My app uses the Spore API to get the 100 newest creations, then displays them in a GridView. The text data about the creations is easy to store, but the images present a problem.

As far as I know, I can either keep the images in a Hashtable or grab them every time they are viewed. Neither of these will work - the Hashtable quickly presents an OutOfMemoryError, and the constant reloading causes a lot of load on the server and a lot of lag on the client.

Is there开发者_如何转开发 a better way to store the images?

First Don't get 100 at a time, there is no way your displaying 100 images in a gridview and having them be a usefully visible size. Retrieve the images asynchronously and get a screen full or a screen and a half at a time. I'm guessing you can display 6 to 9 images of a decent size per screen with supporting text/UI elements, you may even want to choose how many to display based on the handsets screensize/resolution. So you should probably be getting 9 to 12 images at a time.

Second, i don't know what resolution these images are coming in at, but it sounds like 'big'. If the API supports it receive only a thumbnail version for you grid view. If not, what i would probably do is: when you receive an image from the API, first create a new image scaled down to the size needed for your thumbnail that goes into the grid view, keep this in memory. Then create a new image scaled down to the size you would need for your 'detail' screen (if you have one) and cache this to the SD card and free it from ram as well as the original source image, this scaling should probably occur in a separate thread to avoid it impacting the responsiveness of your UI thread. Depending on the usage pattern, I would probably also cache the thumbnails to the SD card so it would be cheap to free the ram they use in onStop/onPause and reload them in onStart/onResume. IT also sounds like you downloading a 'top 100' or something of the sort. Since i wouldn't expect an entires new top 100 on every application use you could save a lot of network traffic by caching the images and information to the SD card and only downloading new entries each time the program runs.

Alternatively a process like:

Receive Image -> Scale in place to detail size -> cache detail size -> scale detail size to thumbnail size in place -> display thumbnail in gridview while caching thumbnail asynchronously

Would use even less memory since there is only ever 1 copy of the image in memory, but it would slow the response of the gridview as the image has to be scaled twice before it gets displayed. It may be fast enough to not matter or you may be able to play tricks with the grid view by having it display the large image (scaled internally) while the thumbnail is generated in the background, switching the gridview to the thumbnail when its ready. You'll just have to try it to determine if its fast enough.