what's the Glide

Recommend [.rekə'mend] 推荐；劝；托；(行为,性质)使人欢喜

In the passed Google Developer Summit Thailand, Googleintroduced us an Image Loader Library for Android developed by bumptech named Glide as alibrary that recommended by Google. It has been used in many Google open sourceprojects till now including Google I/O 2014 official application.

It succeeded in making me interested. I spent a whole nightplaying with it and decided to share  my experience in thisblog post. As a begining, I must say that it looks 90% similar to Picasso. Tobe more precise, I think it is something like a Picasso-clone.

Anyway it is quite different in details. You will learnhow.

Glide [ɡlaɪd] n/滑翔；滑动；滑行；滑音

Picasso毕加索

precise[prɪ'saɪs] adj. 准确的；确切的；精确的；明确的

Picasso

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dependencies {     compile 'com.squareup.picasso:picasso:2.5.1' }

Glide

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dependencies {     compile 'com.github.bumptech.glide:glide:3.5.2'     compile 'com.android.support:support-v4:22.0.0' }

Anyway Glide also needs Android SupportLibrary v4, please don't forget to import support-v4 to your project like above as well. But it is not kind of aproblem since Android Support Library v4 is basically needed in every singlenew-age Android project.

 

basically [ˈbeɪsɪkli] n/基本上；大体上；〈口〉主要地

 

Basic

As I said, it is very similar to Picasso. The way to load an image toImageView with Glide is quite the same as Picasso.

Picasso

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Picasso.with(context)     .load("http://inthecheesefactory.com/uploads/source/glidepicasso/cover.jpg")     .into(ivImg);

Glide

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Glide.with(context)     .load("http://inthecheesefactory.com/uploads/source/glidepicasso/cover.jpg")     .into(ivImg);

 

Basic : ['beɪsɪk] 基本；基本的；基础

 

Although it looks quite the same but in details Glide isdesigned far better since with doesn't accept only Context butalso Activity and Fragment. Context will be automatically extracted from thosethings you throw in.

And the brilliant benefit from passing Activity/Fragment toGlide is: image loading would be integrated with Activity/Fragment'slifecycle for example, pause loading in Paused state and automatically resumeon Resumed state. So I encourage you to pass the Activity or Fragment to Glidenot just a Context if possible.

Brilliant [ˈbriljənt adj. 才华横溢的；卓越的；极好的；(声名)显赫的

benefit ['benəfɪt] 益处；优势；成效；福利费（政府对失业者、病人等提供的补助金）

integrated['ɪntə.ɡreɪtəd adj. 各部分密切协调的；综合的；完整统一的

encourage [ɪn'kʌrɪdʒ

 

You can notice that image loaded by Glide has the worsequality compared to Picasso. Why? This is because Glide default Bitmap Formatis set to RGB_565 since it consumed just 50% memory footprintcompared to ARGB_8888.

Here is the memory consumption graphs between Picassoat ARGB8888 and Glide at RGB565. (Base application consumesaround 8MB)

Format  ['fɔr.mæt] n/格式；设计；开本；总体安排

consumed[kən'sum] v消耗；消灭；吃光；消费掉

footprint['fʊt.prɪnt 足迹；脚印；面积；（通信卫星）覆盖区

 

And yes, hard pixels described above isalso there. In addition, if image is loaded in RGB565 mode, thecached image will be also in RGB565.

When I tried to adjust ImageView to the differentsizes. The result is whatever the size is, Picasso will cache only single sizeof image, the full-size one. Glide acts differently, caches separatefile for each size of ImageView. Although an image has alreadybeen loaded once but if you need to load another size the same image, itneeds to be downloaded once again before be resized to theright resolution and then be cached.

To be more clear, if there is an ImageView in the firstpage with 200x200 pixels dimension and there is the another one in the secondpage with 100x100 pixels that are needed to show the same image. You have todownload the same image twice.

Anyway you could adjust its behavior by let Glide cache both the full-size image and theresized one with this command.

Glide.with(this)

     .load("http://nuuneoi.com/uploads/source/playstore/cover.jpg")

     .diskCacheStrategy(DiskCacheStrategy.ALL)

     .into(ivImgGlide);

The next time image is requested to show on any ImageView,the full-size image would be loaded from cache, resized and then cached.

An advantage of the way Glide was designed is imagecould be loaded and showed very fast. While the Picasso way causes some delayon loading since it needs to be resized first before is set to anImageView even you add this command to make it showed immediately.

Features

You can do almost all the same things just like Picasso can dowith the same style of coding for example, Image Resizing

 

// Picasso .resize(300, 200);   // Glide .override(300, 200);

Center Cropping

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// Picasso .centerCrop();   // Glide .centerCrop();

Transforming  [træns'fɔrm] 改造；转换；转化；变压

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// Picasso .transform(new CircleTransform())   // Glide .transform(new CircleTransform(context))

Setting the Placeholder and Error image

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// Picasso .placeholder(R.drawable.placeholder) .error(R.drawable.imagenotfound)   // Glide .placeholder(R.drawable.placeholder) .error(R.drawable.imagenotfound)

As I said, if you are familiar with Picasso, moving to Glide would be justlike chewing a candy for you. =)

What that Glide has but Picasso doesn't

An ability to load GIF Animation toa simple ImageView might be the most interesting feature of Glide. Andyes, you can't do that with Picasso.

And since Glide is designed to work perfectly with Activity/Fragment'slifecycle so the animation would be automatically paused and resumed alongwith Activity/Fragment's state.

The way Glide caches is still be the same, resized firstand then cached.

Anyway from an measurement I found that GIF Animation consumes quite a lot of memory.Please use it wisely.

Besides GIF Animation loading, Glide is also ableto decode any localvideo file to a still image.

Another feature that might be useful is you can configurethe way image appears with an Animator (R.animator) while Picassocould do only one animation, fading in.

The last one if you could generatea thumbnail file of an image you loaded with thumbnail().

Actually there are some other features you can play withbut most of them are not that important for general use for example, transcodean image into Byte Array, etc.