Postby fcatrin » Mon Feb 12, 2018 4:32 pm
The artwork is downloaded by demand, that's why the scanning is faster than a regular scraping process. The artwork is downloaded only if a) It is not found in your device and b) The artwork is about to be shown in the screen.
That's because two main reasons, it's always fast and one more critical reason to me, it keeps the server costs down.
The artwork is not used "as is" in the app, because Android limits the memory that the application can use, it's radically different from a normal desktop operating system where the apps can use all the available memory. In Android some devices limit the memory to 16M, others to 64M and so on, so one big image may easily consume all the available memory for the app.
So, RetroX keeps two copies of each artwork image, the original and a transformed one. The latter has the required dimensions and also have a subtle masking effect so they don't look so plain in the screen. Until now, those images where stored in a special folder used as a cache, and Android was deleting non used images and they were downloaded and transformed again. For big collections it was noticeable, I wasn't aware until one user showed me that problem in the linked post.
And... THANKS A LOT for your translation. I've just made another beta release with it included.
Franco Catrin
RetroX developer