Create Carousel Easily in Android App with CarouselView

Carousel is a component to show the users a slideshow, usually images. In Android, we can easily create this component using an open-source library called CarouselView.

This is what we will get

Create a New Project

First, let’s create a new project and add this dependency to the newly created project.

implementation 'com.synnapps:carouselview:0.1.4'

Prepare the Images

Now, we need images for our carousel, so choose your own images or grab the examples from here. Save the images in res > drawable so that we have:

Images in Drawable folder

XML Layout

After the dependency added and all the images are ready, now let’s create the layout. I assume you create a new project with Basic Activity template, so open content_main.xml and change it’s content to:

• com.synnapps.carouselview.CarouselView is the View name to show the carousel. It can be written only after adding the dependency above.
• app:fillColor is the property name to choose the fill color for the circle to show which image position is shown.
• app:radius is the property to choose the circle’s size.
• app:slideInterval is the property to choose the time interval before moving the next image.
• app:strokeColor is the property to choose the stroke color of the circle.
• app:strikeWidth is the property name to choose the width of the circle.

MainActivity

Now, let’s move to Java file. Open MainActivity and change it’s content to:

Inline four we create a new object typed CarouselView

• Inline five we create an array of int to store images id that we added in res > drawable
• Inline fourteen we do findViewById() like always
• Inline fifteen we choose the number of the images using length method of the array of sampleImages
• Inline sixteen we call setImageListener which will do the work of running the slideshow based on listener we create inline 28-33

Or, if you want it in Kotlin:

You can also use Picasso to load images from URL (don’t forget to add INTERNET permission and the Gradle dependency):

Run the App

Now, let’s run this app and make sure everything works.

Error java.lang.OutOfMemoryError

Based on Edmondo Di Tucci, the snippet below is not a proper solution. See his reply to the comment section for a better solution.

When I run my app for the first time I got Error java.lang.OutOfMemoryError. It seems that the images are taking too many memories. So, I search the error and I found that adding these two lines to application tag in AndroidManifest.xml will make the app work:

android:hardwareAccelerated="false"
android:largeHeap="true"

Conclusion

With the help of CarouselView, we can easily add image slideshow in the Android app. So, if you want to know more about the library, visit sayyam/CarouselView in Github or you can also see my code here (the library also have the sample which is better)