glide

An image loading and caching library for Android built around one goal: keeping lists of images scrolling smooth and fast, while still handling video stills, GIFs, and remote images.

Glide describes itself as a fast and efficient open source media management and image loading framework for Android. It wraps media decoding, memory and disk caching, and resource pooling into a simple and easy to use interface. The project is written in Java, and the README states that version 4 is released and stable, with updates released periodically for new features and bug fixes.

The library fetches, decodes, and displays video stills, images, and animated GIFs. Its primary focus is making any kind of list of images scroll as smooth and fast as possible, but the README is quick to add that it is also effective for almost any case where you need to fetch, resize, and display a remote image. That second sentence quietly widens the use cases well beyond lists.

Networking is pluggable. Glide ships a flexible API that lets developers connect to almost any network stack. By default it uses a custom HttpURLConnection based stack, but utility libraries exist to plug in Google's Volley project or Square's OkHttp instead, and the README points to optional okhttp3 integration and volley integration dependencies.

The version notes matter if you support older Android. Glide v4 requires a minimum API level of 14 and expects you to compile against API 26 or later. If you need older versions, the README suggests staying on Glide v3, which works on API 10 but is not actively maintained. R8 and Proguard rules are bundled into the aar so R8 can interpret them automatically, and huge images like maps are handled by downsampling rather than zoom and pan.

Getting help is laid out clearly. Problems and feature requests go to GitHub issues, questions and suggestions to the discussion group or the IRC channel at irc.freenode.net glide-library. Contributors must sign Google's individual contributor license agreement before submitting pull requests. A thanks section credits Jake Wharton's disk cache implementation, Dave Smith's GIF decoder, Chris Banes's release script, and Corey Hall for the logo.

• Source 1 · Project repository
• Source 2 · README