Loading tall images from url in slivers preventing whole image from loading into ram

Question

I am looking for a library or some idea on how I can load an image by parts from the disk or a url straight to the disk then in parts again to the ram. So the two ways I see that this can be done is loading the whole image onto the disk by reading and writing it from the url directly using the ram only for the buffer then when the image is on the disk some how creating bitmaps of only parts of the image, that way I DO NOT load it all and putting those in a ListView.

The issue is that I am dealing with extremely long images (10K + pixels long w/ a width of 4-600) and they hog up lots of ram if loaded all in one bitmap. I can not just scale them down like the Google android tutorial does in the handling large bitmaps section as that results in a width too small to deal with. So if I can somehow generate small bitmap slivers on the disk I can use them by loading them in a ListView preventing loading the image as a whole into ram.

Right now I am breaking the long images into slivers from a bitmap and I realized that that isn't really accomplishing what I am trying to do as the whole image is loaded into a bitmap in memory and is then broken up, then GC (So I am using up the full abmount of ram anyways). I am testing on a new top of the line android phone and the app works fine, but the heap size reaches 80mb+ with the larger images temporarily in ram as it breaks down the bitmap and this will be an issue with devices that have lower heap limits

Answer 1

You can try using this class, support from 2.3 http://developer.android.com/reference/android/graphics/BitmapRegionDecoder.html

Answer 2

If you are using Java you can work with InputStreamReader and OutputStreamWriter. Method read() accepts the buffer as one of the parameters, its length can be anything suitable. Of course you can create a new file for each buffer being written.

Is it what you're looking for?

edit well its not. have you seen this Strange out of memory issue while loading an image to a Bitmap object ?