Scaling images is a common task for many applications including those written for Android. The most obvious approach, as described on this page, won’t work in most cases. The problem as you would soon find out if you tried it is that your phone doesn’t have enough memory. Luckily we can get around that, but not easily.
The trick ends up being a two step process. First we decode the bitmap, setting the sampling level as high as we can while avoiding loss of quality, then we scale this smaller bitmap in memory down to the exact specified size. I’ve included this in a nicely packaged class BitmapScaler, included at the end of this post.The class itself looks quite long but this is only because it has the flexibility of scaling bitmaps from resources, assets, and files.
BitmapScaler preserves the aspect ratio. You may only pass a new width. The resulting height will be scaled equal to the amount the width was scaled.
For example,
BitmapScaler scaler = new BitmapScaler(getResources(), R.drawable.moorwen, newWidth); imageView.setImageBitmap(scaler.getScaled());
BitmapScaler class follows,
class BitmapScaler {
private static class Size {
int sample;
float scale;
}
private Bitmap scaled;
BitmapScaler(Resources resources, int resId, int newWidth)
throws IOException {
Size size = getRoughSize(resources, resId, newWidth);
roughScaleImage(resources, resId, size);
scaleImage(newWidth);
}
BitmapScaler(File file, int newWidth) throws IOException {
InputStream is = null;
try {
is = new FileInputStream(file);
Size size = getRoughSize(is, newWidth);
try {
is = new FileInputStream(file);
roughScaleImage(is, size);
scaleImage(newWidth);
} finally {
is.close();
}
} finally {
is.close();
}
}
BitmapScaler(AssetManager manager, String assetName, int newWidth)
throws IOException {
InputStream is = null;
try {
is = manager.open(assetName);
Size size = getRoughSize(is, newWidth);
try {
is = manager.open(assetName);
roughScaleImage(is, size);
scaleImage(newWidth);
} finally {
is.close();
}
} finally {
is.close();
}
}
Bitmap getScaled() {
return scaled;
}
private void scaleImage(int newWidth) {
int width = scaled.getWidth();
int height = scaled.getHeight();
float scaleWidth = ((float) newWidth) / width;
float ratio = ((float) scaled.getWidth()) / newWidth;
int newHeight = (int) (height / ratio);
float scaleHeight = ((float) newHeight) / height;
Matrix matrix = new Matrix();
matrix.postScale(scaleWidth, scaleHeight);
scaled = Bitmap.createBitmap(scaled, 0, 0, width, height, matrix, true);
}
private void roughScaleImage(InputStream is, Size size) {
Matrix matrix = new Matrix();
matrix.postScale(size.scale, size.scale);
BitmapFactory.Options scaledOpts = new BitmapFactory.Options();
scaledOpts.inSampleSize = size.sample;
scaled = BitmapFactory.decodeStream(is, null, scaledOpts);
}
private void roughScaleImage(Resources resources, int resId, Size size) {
Matrix matrix = new Matrix();
matrix.postScale(size.scale, size.scale);
BitmapFactory.Options scaledOpts = new BitmapFactory.Options();
scaledOpts.inSampleSize = size.sample;
scaled = BitmapFactory.decodeResource(resources, resId, scaledOpts);
}
private Size getRoughSize(InputStream is, int newWidth) {
BitmapFactory.Options o = new BitmapFactory.Options();
o.inJustDecodeBounds = true;
BitmapFactory.decodeStream(is, null, o);
Size size = getRoughSize(o.outWidth, o.outHeight, newWidth);
return size;
}
private Size getRoughSize(Resources resources, int resId, int newWidth) {
BitmapFactory.Options o = new BitmapFactory.Options();
o.inJustDecodeBounds = true;
BitmapFactory.decodeResource(resources, resId, o);
Size size = getRoughSize(o.outWidth, o.outHeight, newWidth);
return size;
}
private Size getRoughSize(int outWidth, int outHeight, int newWidth) {
Size size = new Size();
size.scale = outWidth / newWidth;
size.sample = 1;
int width = outWidth;
int height = outHeight;
int newHeight = (int) (outHeight / size.scale);
while (true) {
if (width / 2 < newWidth || height / 2 < newHeight) {
break;
}
width /= 2;
height /= 2;
size.sample *= 2;
}
return size;
}
}
Or, try out the Eclipse test project.


Send me your sample code
Thank you, thank you! You helped me finally resolve my issue after much searching.
Hi!
Can you please update the constructor for byte array?
If we pass the byte array of the bitmap with new Widht then it should return the scaled bitmap.
Thanks man, every day goes by I realize how far I am from expert. Big help.
Thank you.