I've got an app which dynamically generates anywhere from 6 to 100 small bitmaps for the user to move around the screen in a given session. I currently generate them in onCreate and store them to the sd card, so that after an orientation change I can grab them out of external storage and display them again. However, this takes time (the loading) and I'd like to keep the bitmap references around between lifecyle changes for quicker access.

My question is, is there a better place to store my generated bitmaps? I was thinking about creating a static storage library in my base activity, something that would only need to be reloaded when the app is completely removed from memory (shutdown, other apps need resources, 30 minute restart, etc).

Ideally, I'd like the user to be able to back out to the title screen, click a "Resume" button, and in onCreate I just have access to those resident bitmap references instead of having to load them from storage again. For this reason I don't think Activity.onRetainNonConfigurationInstance is what I need.

Alternatively, is there a better way to handle multiple generated bitmaps than what I'm doing or the plan I described?