At what point, in terms of the quantity and size of images that you want to display in an app, is it better to serve images from a Web site than to store them locally in the app?
I am cartoonist who is learning java and android development so I can create an app that displays my cartoons, which are animated GIF files. The first version of the app will display about 100 GIFs, each about 50K in size. I expect the GIF collection to grow to 1000. I see other apps on Google play display image files and they are only 5MB, which makes me think that I should not try to store images locally in my app. But I am concerned about having them load as fast as possible.
I have found many useful code examples for displaying animated gifs in an android app using android.graphics.movie and WebView that show how to implement local storage or load from the Web. But I have not been able to find any recommendations about when, depending on the number and size of images involved, it is better to choose local over external or the other way around.
Thank you for any help you can offer!