Pictures, Thumbnails, and the MediaStore

One of the cool feature of the Android SDK is the MediaStore ContentProvider. This is basically a database with metadata about all of the photos on your device. If you are going to display some or all of the photos on a device, you will probably want to show a thumbnail version of the photo. Once again Android's got you covered. The MediaStore.Images.Thumbnails.getThumbnail function can get you a thumbnail for a given picture. But the devil's in the details here. This method will create a thumbnail if one does not already exist. That's a blocking call, but it will return quickly if the thumbnail has already been created. This is an API that any app could call, so if another app has called it for a particular image, then that thumbnail will (probably) already exist. In addition, some phones automatically create thumbnails when you take a picture. However none of these things are guaranteed, so it made me wonder just how many pictures on my phone already had thumbnails made for them. So I wrote a little app to determine this. Here's a screenshot showing the result.

Tapping the first button causes all of the pics in the MediaStore to be counted. Tapping the second button causes all of the thumbnails in the MediaStore to be counted. Tapping the third button causes the thumbs to be counted and put into a HashSet, then iterate over all pics and see if they have a corresponding thumb or not. You can find all of the code on GitHub.

The results on my phone were a bit surprising. First, the biggest number on the screen is the number of thumbnails. There are more thumbnails than photos! My guess is that photos get deleted but their thumbnails persist. Going back to the original question, it looks like about 90% of the photos on my phone have thumbnails already. So any app that uses the MediaStore thumbnails (as opposed to creating their own) will probably be very snappy. At least on my phone. I'm curious what the results would be on your phone. So here's the APK, you can install it on your phone and let me know what are the results.