Difference of setting an Image from Resource to Drawables?

Question

Example of this is for setImageResource vs. setImageDrawable same goes for a Background?

What is the preferred choice then?

Answer 1

According to the documentation setImageResource does Bitmap reading and decoding on the UI thread, which can cause a latency hiccup. So your question would be better if you'd ask in which cases setImageResource is a better choice above setImageDrawable.

My guess would be that the setImageResource is used for lazy loading images, and setImageDrawable is used when you already loaded the image through a Drawable during view initiation. Which one is suiting you best probably depends on whether you have more serious memory constraints or not; in my experience, setImageResource is scarcely ever needed.

And to answer why your code doesn't work; this is because you can't do getDrawable() from a resourceId 0, this throws an exception as it can't find the resource. Since setImageResource is lazy loading, it checks if the resource is 0 before creating the Drawable, and hence throws no exception. You could probably refactor it to an if(checked) setImageDrawable(..) else setImageDrawable(null);