I am developing an android application in which when a user logins through facebook his profile picture gets stored. Then the user is shown the profile pictures of his fb friends who have installed the app, one by one. First, one friend's pic is shown then on click of next button, next friend's pic is shown. This continues till all the friends images have been shown to the user or user has skipped the section.
First, I thought of storing all the images in my database and then retrieve them one by one as the user presses the next button. But doing so will render very slow performance as for every time an image has to be shown to the user I have to hit the db.
The alternative is to store images in my local drive and store every image's location in the db.
Please elaborate on how this could be achieved and the performance issues in this case considering a large user base? Also suggest any other way of achieving the aim, if you may.
I am using WAMP for the purpose.
Thanks in advance.
The pictures are stored in the apps cache after they are downloaded.
When the user logs in to fb for the 1st time it will download the images.
2nd time it will get them from cache unless its a new image.
clear the cache when it gets to a certain MB limit and keep it small
I suggest using Google Volley library to get images from the net as when setup properly you can expire / clear images from the cache.
The are are other libraries for image loading and handling to consider such as Universal Image loader and Picasso but Volley can also be used for fetching Data from the Net.