MoStacks supports pictures as the values of picture fields. Because picture fields are fields like any other, this leads to rather flexible possibilities for dealing with pictures. E.g. you are not limited to a single picture field per card. There is full clipboard support for pictures: You can copy, cut and paste them as easy like text.
There is also a second, less important use of pictures as background "wallpapers" to "decorate" cards.
On Symbian/UIQ3 MoStacks uses the standard picture support of the operating system, which can deal with the following formats:
- GIF
- JPEG
- PNG
- Windows bitmaps
- Symbian bitmaps
On Windows, MoStacks uses the free open-source FreeImage image processing library. Because FreeImage supports more formats than Symbian, there is the possibility that MoStacks on Windows is able to import/load a picture that Symbian later will not be able to display. If you try to load such a picture, MoStacks displays a warning.
Pictures, like everything else, are included in the single file that contains the stack. They are not only "linked in" by storing the name of the picture file, with the danger that these links will break and possible problems when transferring the stack between phone and PC; they fully become part of the stack.
However, this system also has a potential disadvantage: Stacks containing pictures can become rather large pretty quickly, because pictures are so much bigger than "normal" field values which are e.g. text strings taking 50 bytes or even less.
A stack with many pictures should be no big problem for phone main memory however, because other than anything else pictures are not all loaded into memory when you open a stack. They are loaded only when needed, kept for a certain time in memory and discarded again to make room for newly needed pictures. (Programmers call such a construct a cache.)
Furthermore, if a picture is large, the picture control in the card view does not directly show the picture. This is not necessary, because you won't be able to see many details anyway in the small space, and it would make browsing of cards pretty slow (it can take 15 or even 30 seconds to just load, resize and display a large picture).
What is shown instead is a much reduced second version of the picture, a so-called thumbnail picture. Handling of that second picture is all automatic, you don't need to do anything with it yourself.
To see the full original picture, open the picture view.