picasso
A powerful image downloading and caching library for Android
A now-deprecated Android library from Square that downloads, caches, and displays remote images in your app with a single line of code, but the team now recommends migrating to Coil for new projects.
Picasso is an Android library from Square that handles downloading images from the internet and caching them so they display quickly and efficiently in your app. Loading remote images in Android is surprisingly complex — you need to manage background threads, memory, disk cache, and error states — and Picasso handles all of that automatically. However, the library is now officially deprecated and the authors recommend migrating to Coil, especially for projects that use Compose UI.
You would have used Picasso when building an Android app that displays images loaded from URLs, such as user avatars, product photos, or news thumbnails. It requires at minimum Java 8 and Android API level 21. It is available via Gradle as com.squareup.picasso:picasso:2.8 and is licensed under Apache License 2.0. Existing versions continue to work, but no new releases are planned.
Where it fits
- Display user avatars loaded from a URL in an Android RecyclerView list with automatic memory and disk caching.
- Load product images from a remote API into an Android e-commerce app without managing background threads yourself.
- Show news article thumbnails in an Android app with automatic caching for smooth, fast scrolling.