[Solved] Memory allocation when loading a really large image on Android

Question

First things first,
14.5 MB is the size of the JPEG but not the size of your actual image.
Similarly, try to resave the image as png, you will see that size is increased by factors of 10, i.e. it might even reach 150 MB

One thing that you must keep in mind is that these images are compressed into JPEG or PNG.
But when these images are loaded into imageview or so, each Bit of the image is decompressed and occupies a memory in RAM.

So the actual size of your image is basically its resolution multiplied by 4 (A-R-G-B)

EDIT – How to handle these images then?
Firstly, use Glide (or Picasso) to load the images, instead of writing own AsyncTask for this.

In Glide there is a method called override(int width, int height) which will resize the image while downloading.
Ideally width and height should be the exact dimension of the ImageView (or any view), this will prevent the image from pixellating and also it will save the additional consumption of the memory. (you can always do minor calculations to retain image aspect ratio too)

Accepted Answer

First things first,
14.5 MB is the size of the JPEG but not the size of your actual image.
Similarly, try to resave the image as png, you will see that size is increased by factors of 10, i.e. it might even reach 150 MB

One thing that you must keep in mind is that these images are compressed into JPEG or PNG.
But when these images are loaded into imageview or so, each Bit of the image is decompressed and occupies a memory in RAM.

So the actual size of your image is basically its resolution multiplied by 4 (A-R-G-B)

EDIT – How to handle these images then?
Firstly, use Glide (or Picasso) to load the images, instead of writing own AsyncTask for this.

In Glide there is a method called override(int width, int height) which will resize the image while downloading.
Ideally width and height should be the exact dimension of the ImageView (or any view), this will prevent the image from pixellating and also it will save the additional consumption of the memory. (you can always do minor calculations to retain image aspect ratio too)