BUBuddhaSource·Aug 7, 2013Submission
SmartImageView a beautiful library most android dev miss out on
2 points · Open discussionloopj
android-smart-image-view
Java2012–2013
loopj / android-smart-image-view
android-smart-image-view
Android ImageView replacement which allows image loading from URLs or contact address book, with caching
2Distinct people
2Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.3KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Android ImageView replacement which allows image loading from URLs or contact address book, with caching
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by month2 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2012-04-18 15:38:34 UTC to 2013-08-07 19:13:30 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 2012 | 2012-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| May 2012 | 2012-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jun 2012 | 2012-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jul 2012 | 2012-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 2012 | 2012-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 2012 | 2012-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 2012 | 2012-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Nov 2012 | 2012-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Dec 2012 | 2012-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jan 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Feb 2013 | 2013-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mar 2013 | 2013-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Apr 2013 | 2013-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| May 2013 | 2013-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jun 2013 | 2013-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jul 2013 | 2013-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 2013 | 2013-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
2 sourcesThe OutOfMemory issue is a pretty big problem, but I'd say it's quite lazy to just dismiss it as something the framework needs to fix so that you can effectively do your job. I ran into this problem a lot early on in my Android development, and as I studied it further I found tons of resources and information to make it work in all cases and there are plenty of creative solutions documented in blogs and discussed on StackOverflow about it as well. Half the time you can get around this error by recycling your bitmaps when you're done with them and/or rethinking your approach to needing really large bitmaps in memory at the same time. There are two things I've done commonly in apps to get around this.
(1) If I'm just expanding included resource files (compressed images) into bitmaps for display, I write my own intelligent cache. Backed
Read the rest
by a simple HashMap, I can even include in my cache keys the desired height and width and downsample intelligently and cache the downsampled version. Funny enough, when I presented this to my coworker, he had just done almost the exact same thing and we had never discussed it. In one case I needed to categorize my images to flush some and not others from the cache, so I just wrapped a bunch of instances of the same BitmapCache into a BitmapCacheManager class and it worked like a charm.
(2) To get around the fact that you can't just set the source path of an ImageView to a web url, you can use a custom class that wraps ImageView and just handles downloading the image on a background thread. I wrote a pretty complicated system that pumps the urls to a queue and broadcasts a notification when each download completes, but a single google search pointed me to an awesome apache licensed library that does exactly the same thing (and is admittedly cleaner than mine).
https://github.com/loopj/android-smart-image-view
It's totally doable. I never looked at it as a limitation of the framework - I actually saw it as an opportunity to do something more challenging than just drawing within the lines of the framework.