Image Loading

Dependencies

Loading an image from the Internet may sound like a trivial task, but it is not. There are a lot of cases which we would have to handle, some of them include the following:

• Storing and retrieving the image from the RAM cache
• Storing and retrieving the image from the disk cache
• Scaling and resizing the image
• Displaying the loading state and the error state
• Handling out-of-memory scenarios
• Handling concurrent image loading
• Etc.

To avoid handling all the scenarios described above, there are several popular image loader libraries developed and distributed as open source. The most popular are:

• Glide
• Fresco
• Picasso

In this lesson, we are going to use the Glide image loader. Let’s add the new library dependencies to the app/build.gradle file in the dependencies section.