FossifyOrg
Allow disable fade-in of thumbnails when scrolling
Checklist
- [X] I made sure that there are no existing issues - open or closed - to which I could contribute my information.
- [X] I made sure that there are no existing discussions - open or closed - to which I could contribute my information.
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- [X] I have taken the time to fill in all the required details. I understand that the bug report will be dismissed otherwise.
- [X] This issue contains only one feature request.
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Feature description
Allow disable fade-in of thumbnails to increase scrolling speed, reduce CPU/GPU use
Why do you want this feature?
Main issue stopping me moving on from QuickPic is sluggish scrolling of thumbnails, especially on older/slower devices. This appears to be because thumbnails fade into view from black. I assume this was an aesthetic choice and not for some other technical reason? On faster/recent devices the fade-in effect isn't that noticeable so I think it adds little value.
My hope is the effect could be made optional in the settings?
Additional information
No response
Related: https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools/Simple-Gallery/issues/2796 My impression is that loading is actually slow, it is more apparent without the fade-in.
@gmasil Thanks for linking to the previous request.
Have noticed QuickPic is creating smaller thumbnails which surely helps. For the same ~3,000 images QuickPic has a cache of 93MB and Gallery 229MB. You really have to look closely at thumbnails with text to notice the difference on screen.
Cache size has been raised before I don't think anyone suggested a thumbnail quality setting or just reducing size/quality to benefit performance?
QuickPic
Gallery
Hi, that's a good point. I turned down the thumbnail resolution, but it didn't seem to have an impact. I started a branch here to investigate: https://github.com/gmasil/Fossify-Gallery/tree/investigate-slow-image-scrolling There is some lazy loading mechanism that I turned off and increased the prefetching of images during scrolling. Sadly this is running on the UI thread and thus introduces a stuttering UI during the eager thumbnail loading. Once all images are loaded the scrolling is very fast and smooth.
I can't help with coding but happy to test APKs.
I've tested a couple of other galleries including Aves (https://github.com/deckerst/aves/). The UI is awful and it's very slow creating thumbnails but after that it has fast pop-up of thumbnails when scrolling. It's hard to make the screen go entirely black, even when throwing the scroll bar up/down.
Can anything be learned from their code?
I have reduced the fade-in duration from 300ms to 150ms in version 1.1.3 but as @gmasil pointed out above, it is the image loader that needs to be optimized. Running the code on the main thread isn't helping either.
@naveensingh Thanks, I've tested the change on 4 devices and think there's a small improvement on most. On the oldest/slowest device (2015 mid-spec tablet) there's more stuttering compared to an old version of SMT Gallery.
So I can see why the delay was set quite high to help older devices. My other high-end devices from 2016-2019 are OK so hopefully most users today won't see any stuttering.
Is the image loader something that can be optimised? Do you think there's any potential boost from a smaller thumbnail size?
@naveensingh thank you for the improvement! But could you please add a setting to disable the fade-in duration completely? Thx :)
sluggish scrolling of thumbnails
This should be fixed in the next update. There was a (unnecessary) lazy loading mechanism that delayed loading by 100 milliseconds.
I have also conditionally disabled fade-in animation when loading from cache because it usually is instantaneous on most devices.
Just tested v1.2.1 and loading/scrolling is so fast now! As fast as any gallery I've tested, great work!