Loading large images as thumbnails without memory issues in Java?

Question

I\'m trying to let the user load images from their harddrive, and present these visually in the GUI as a list of thumbnails (JPanels with icons added to a JList). I\'m curre

Answer 1

The JVM has a nasty habit of caching images. One way to get around it is to:

1. Create an InputStream pointing to the image.
2. Read the entire image data into a byte[] (using standard I/O APIs - outside imageio etc.).
3. Create a ByteArrayInputStream from the byte[].
4. Use the ByteArrayInputStream as a source for ImageIO.read(InputStream).

Because the JVM does not know from what resource the image bytes were obtained it is unable to uniquely identify the image, and will not cache it.

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Mind you, I cannot find any documentation that backs up what I am saying. This is just from past experience.