About Glide

Glide is a fast and efficient image loading library for Android focused on smooth scrolling. Glide offers an easy to use API, a performant and extensible resource decoding pipeline and automatic resource pooling.

Glide supports fetching, decoding, and displaying video stills, images, and animated GIFs. Glide includes a flexible api that allows developers to plug in to almost any network stack. By default Glide uses a custom HttpUrlConnection based stack, but also includes utility libraries plug in to Google’s Volley project or Square’s OkHttp library instead.

Glide’s primary focus is on making scrolling any kind of a list of images as smooth and fast as possible, but Glide is also effective for almost any case where you need to fetch, resize, and display a remote image.

API

Glide uses a simple fluent API that allows users to make most requests in a single line:

Glide.with(fragment)
    .load(url)
    .into(imageView);

Performance

Glide takes in to account two key aspects of image loading performance on Android:

  • The speed at which images can be decoded.
  • The amount of jank incurred while decoding images.

For users to have a great experience with an app, images must not only appear quickly, but they must also do so without causing lots of jank and stuttering from main thread I/O or excessive garbage collections.

Glide takes a number of steps to ensure image loading is both as fast and as smooth as possible on Android:

  • Smart and automatic downsampling and caching minimize storage overhead and decode times.
  • Aggressive re-use of resources like byte arrays and Bitmaps minimizes expensive garbage collections and heap fragmentation.
  • Deep lifecycle integration ensures that only requests for active Fragments and Activities are prioritized and that Applications release resources when necessary to avoid being killed when backgrounded.

Getting Started

Start by visiting the Download and Setup page to learn how to integrate Glide in to your app. Then take a look at the Getting Started page to learn the basics. For more help and examples, continue on through the rest of the Documentation section, or take a look at one of our many sample apps.

Requirements

Glide v4 requires Android Ice Cream Sandwich (API level 14) or higher.