Android how to create runtime thumbnail

Question

I have a large sized image. At runtime, I want to read the image from storage and scale it so that its weight and size gets reduced and I can use it as a thumbnail. When a u

Answer 1

The best solution I found is the following. Compared with the other solutions this one does not need to load the full image for creating a thumbnail, so it is more efficient! Its limit is that you can not have a thumbnail with exact width and height but the solution as near as possible.

File file = ...; // the image file

Options bitmapOptions = new Options();
bitmapOptions.inJustDecodeBounds = true; // obtain the size of the image, without loading it in memory
BitmapFactory.decodeFile(file.getAbsolutePath(), bitmapOptions);

// find the best scaling factor for the desired dimensions
int desiredWidth = 400;
int desiredHeight = 300;
float widthScale = (float)bitmapOptions.outWidth/desiredWidth;
float heightScale = (float)bitmapOptions.outHeight/desiredHeight;
float scale = Math.min(widthScale, heightScale);

int sampleSize = 1;
while (sampleSize < scale) {
    sampleSize *= 2;
}
bitmapOptions.inSampleSize = sampleSize; // this value must be a power of 2,
                                         // this is why you can not have an image scaled as you would like
bitmapOptions.inJustDecodeBounds = false; // now we want to load the image

// Let's load just the part of the image necessary for creating the thumbnail, not the whole image
Bitmap thumbnail = BitmapFactory.decodeFile(file.getAbsolutePath(), bitmapOptions);

// Save the thumbnail
File thumbnailFile = ...;
FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream(thumbnailFile);
thumbnail.compress(Bitmap.CompressFormat.JPEG, 90, fos);
fos.flush();
fos.close();

// Use the thumbail on an ImageView or recycle it!
thumbnail.recycle();