OutOfMemory exception when loading bitmap from external storage

Question

In my application I load a couple of images from JPEG and PNG files. When I place all those files into assets directory and load it in this way, everything is ok:

Answer 1

Thanks to all the threads, I've found a solution that works for me on a real device. The tricks are all about using

BitmapFactory.Options opts=new BitmapFactory.Options();
opts.inSampleSize=(int)(target_size/bitmap_size); //if original bitmap is bigger

But for me this was not enough. My original image (taken from the Camera app) was 3264x2448. The correct ratio for me was 3, since i wanted a plain VGA image of 1024x768.

But setting inSampleSize to 3 was not enough: still out of memory exception. So in the end I opted for a iterative approach: I start from the computed correct size, and increase it until I stop having a OOM exception. For me it was at sample of 4.

// Decode with inSampleSize
BitmapFactory.Options o2 = new BitmapFactory.Options();
// o2.inSampleSize = scale;
float trueScale = o.outWidth / 1024;
o2.inPurgeable = true;
o2.inDither = false;
Bitmap b = null;
do {
     o2.inSampleSize = (int) trueScale;
     Log.d(TAG, "Scale is " + trueScale);
 try {
    b = BitmapFactory.decodeStream(new FileInputStream(f), null, o2);
    } catch (OutOfMemoryError e) {
        Log.e(TAG,"Error decoding image at sampling "+trueScale+", resampling.."+e);
        System.gc();
    try {
        Thread.sleep(50);
     } catch (InterruptedException e1) { 
         e1.printStackTrace();
     }
}
    trueScale += 1;
} while (b==null && trueScale < 10);
return b;