where to persist multiple image files on android

Question

I'm writing an android app that makes use of many images(dozens). These images, like most of the other data in the app, are updated from a remote database. For the data I am going to have a local database and sync it with the remote database every time the remote db is updated.

The remote database will store the images as URLs, and my app will download the images from these urls to display them in the app. So I could just have my local database sync with the remote one and I'll have the URL of all the image files I'm using and I can re download them from the remote server every time the app is run, but this is obviously slow and wastes a lot of data.

What I want to do is, everytime the database is updated and needs to be synced, the app will sync its local db and download the new images from their URLs as usual, but then it will save the image files somewhere on the device, so next time the app is run it can just grab the images from the device.

I can't seem to find an effective way of doing this, perhaps it's because it's a bad idea to do it this way in the first place? Sharepreferences probably won't have enough room, external storage isn't available all the time, and I hear it's a bad idea to just store a big chunk of binary data(such as an image) in the local database.

What are my options here?

Answer 1

Start with Android Storage Options.

Further:

external storage isn't available all the time

That's true in theory, but in practice, you'll have external storage 99% of the time, especially if you're developing for newer devices. Note that "external storage" and SD Card aren't the same thing -- the terminology here is confusing. For this, use getExternalFilesDir().

Regardless, if your image storage is a reasonable amount (<100MB is reasonable IMHO), then you can just use internal storage. As of Android 3.x, this won't cause a device to run out of space like early devices did. In practice, you'll be fine 99% of the time. Here you might want to use the cache dir, returned by getCacheDir().

In one of my apps I have a large number of files that are synced with a CDN. I use the sync process and database to retrieve download URLs and MD5 hashes of the files. If the MD5 hash has changed, then I download the file again in the background. I simply store the file using the hash as the file-name, so I can easily resolve duplicate files. Periodically, I also walk the cacheDir to see whether there are any files that are no longer referenced in the database.