Tony Lukasavage

Caffeine. Whiskey. Code. Mostly the last one.

Display Images from the Internet in Android

The Overview

I’ll make my usual yammering quick so you can get straight to the good stuff. This is just a snippet to show you how you can display an image from the Internet in your native Android app via ImageView. This is ideal in a few situations, namely when you need to keep app size and initial load time down, or if it isn’t feasible to locally store all the images your app will use.


The Code

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42

package com.savagelook;

import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.net.MalformedURLException;
import java.net.URL;

import android.app.Activity;
import android.graphics.drawable.Drawable;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.widget.ImageView;

public class ShowImageActivity extends Activity {
    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);

        // YOUR_LAYOUT is the name of your layout resource
        // IMAGEVIEW_ID is your ImageView in YOUR_LAYOUT
        setContentView(R.layout.YOUR_LAYOUT);
        ImageView imageView = (ImageView)findViewById(R.id.IMAGEVIEW_ID);

        imageView.setImageDrawable(createDrawableFromURL("http://savagelook.com/misc/sl_drop2.png"));
    }

    private Drawable createDrawableFromURL(String urlString) {
        Drawable image = null;
  try {
      URL url = new URL(urlString);
      InputStream is = (InputStream)url.getContent();
      image = Drawable.createFromStream(is, "src");
  } catch (MalformedURLException e) {
      // handle URL exception
      image = null;
  } catch (IOException e) {
      // handle InputStream exception
      image = null;
  }

  return image;
    }
}