Reducing image size

Hey Joseph!

Sorry about my late response - I've been extremely busy with exams lately.

Anyhow, I don't believe it's possible to always have a fixed file size for images - they will always differ by a few kilobytes/bytes and it's extremely difficult to set a file to be an exact size.

I haven't actually noticed an increase in file size as my images are set to decrease in file quality before being sent off (Which Ben does show you how to do in the course if you're interested). I did however, test my code out without the decrease in file size and found that my 5.08mb file remained at 5.08mb so I'm not sure what caused your photo to end up with a larger size.

Perhaps your device is telling you an incorrect file size? That would be my only guess. I know this works in Lollipop definitely but not sure about other versions: when you click Choose Photo, go into the Overflow Menu and select Show file sizes and see what it comes up with there - I got the same file size shown on this screen as I did after going into Parse and downloading the image from my Dashboard. See if this works for you.

Hopefully this should help but if there's anything else you want to know, give me a shout and I'll try my best to help out :)

I am working with images and found the same problem. I uploaded an image of 2.49MB and got an image of 3.19MB from Parse. It happens because of different format: the FileHelper class compresses the JPEG image file from gallery to PNG file: bitmap.compress(Bitmap.CompressFormat.PNG, 100, outputStream). Google the difference between JPEG and PNG to learn more. If you want to reduce it down, do this: bitmap.compress(Bitmap.CompressFormat.JPEG, 50, outputStream), but the quality of your image comes down.

Hey there!

Nice find Marcelino Yax! We can even swap out the format based on the extension type.

To do this, get the extension type in RecipientsActivity.java after you have set mMediaUri like this:

// First, add this member variable:
private String mExtension;
// Next, set the extension:
mExtension = FilenameUtils.getExtension(mMediaUri.toString());

Now, update your reduceImageForUpload() method in FileHelper.java to take in an extension as well:

public static byte[] reduceImageForUpload(byte[] imageData, String ext) {

Back over in RecipientsActivity.java, you will need to update the method parameters:

fileBytes = FileHelper.reduceImageForUpload(fileBytes, mExtension);

Finally in FileHelper.java again, we can compress based on the file type:

if (ext.equals("jpg") || ext.equals("jpeg")) {
    bitmap.compress(Bitmap.CompressFormat.JPEG, 100, outputStream);
} else {
    bitmap.compress(Bitmap.CompressFormat.PNG, 100, outputStream);
}

Phewp! That was a lot of file switching, sorry about that! This will work perfectly fine as a way to compress based on file type. Note that I am only compressing JPG's separately here, if it's of a different format then it will default to a PNG. Also, my code could probably have a bit of polishing here! I did originally try for a switch statement but realised Android uses Java 6 and String switches came in Java 7 :'(

If there's anything else you need, feel free to give me a shout :)