CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidandroid-layout
adohertyd
adohertyd

Reputation: 2689

Working with images in android app development

Very much a newbie question here but I cannot find a clear answer on the net or in the books I have. I am designing an app to be compatible with all sizes of android devices and I want to display a images in my app. I understand that android automatically scales images to suit the resolution of the screen being displayed.

My question is what do I look for in the images I use? E.g. I have a picture that's 2418 x 2192 @ 240dpi. As far as I can tell, this should be perfect for a larger screen such as a tablet. If I put this into the xhdpi image folder in my project will it be detected by other devices and scaled to suit their dimensions/resolutions? Do I have to create 3 different versions of this image in photoshop and put it into the relevant dpi folders?

I can't find a nice beginners tutorial for this stuff so haven't a clue what I'm doing!

Upvotes: 4

Views: 5325

Answers (2)

323go
323go

Reputation: 14274

This is something you'll deal with on just about all project, because there simply are so many Android devices. This resource has helped me greatly.

If you have a resource in only ONE folder, Android will scale it for you. The different drawable folders are intended to allow the developer to provide properly scaled images with minimal effort. For example, you'll want to provide an xhdpi in addition to the "standard" mdpi image to make assets look better on high-resolution devices. The app would work fine (and have scaled images) in all resolutions, even if you provided only a single image. However, if you provided a xhdpi drawable, then there's a bit of overhead to scale all of those down, and especially for icons, the results may not look very good (or even be recognizable).

I generally provide assets for mdpi and xhdpi, but if the app will see frequent use on low-res devices, I provide the ldpi as well. If possible, I include all four.

Note: The image you mention is much too large to be included in the UI resources and would probably best be placed in assets and loaded on request. Even on xhdpi devices, it would have to be scaled down.

Upvotes: 2

ajpolt
ajpolt

Reputation: 1002

This is the best place to start for multiple screen size support:

http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html

The short answer is, yes, you place the images in the different directories based on resolution and Android will select which image to use based on the device's properties. You should make a smaller set of images, for example, for mdpi and hdpi. You don't "have to" do that, and if you just place the image into drawable it can be scaled down, but that's generally not the best way to go.

Upvotes: 2

Related Questions