android gridview of images fails on compiled version

I have a gridview of images in my android app. It is an image gallery for an artist, so there are about 180 relatively high quality images in the resource folder. It works fine in the emulator and on my HTC Evo in debug 开发者_C百科mode. However when I publish it to the market and install it from there it crashes when the gridview is attempted to be loaded.

Is there a limit on locally defined images or is there a better way to manage so many images?

I went ahead and processed all the images into a worthwhile size for the respective

/res/drawable-hdpi  (around 1000px wide or high)
/res/drawable-mdpi  (max 300px)
/res/drawable-ldpi  (max 75px)

and even though the compiled app is even bigger, it runs much better and does not crash on opening the gallery gridview.