Pictures associated with CardInfos are retrieved either from on-disk or the network through the CardPictureLoader.
In most cases, you don't need to concern yourself with the internals of CardPictureLoader.
Simply using one of the ways described in Displaying Cards is enough to automatically queue a request to the CardPictureLoader when the chosen widget is shown, emitting signals to refresh the widget when the request is finished.
CardPictureLoader::getPixmap() is called exactly two times in the code base, in CardInfoPictureWidget::loadPixmap(), the base class for all widget based card picture display, and AbstractCardItem::paintPicture(), the base class for all QGraphicsItem based card picture display. See Displaying Cards for more information on the difference between these two display methods.
Because both of these calls are made in the paintEvent() methods of their respective classes, this means that requests are issued as soon as but not before the widget is shown on screen.
It is also possible to "warm up" the cache by issuing card picture load requests to the CardPictureLoader without using a display widget and waiting for it to be shown by calling CardPictureLoader::cacheCardPixmaps() with a list of ExactCards.
Cockatrice uses the QPixmapCache from the Qt GUI module to store card pictures in-memory and the QNetworkDiskCache from the Qt Network module to cache network requests for card pictures on-disk.
What this means is that the CardPictureLoader will first attempt to look up a card in the QPixmapCache according to the ExactCard::getPixmapCacheKey() method of an ExactCard object. If it does not find it in the in-memory cache, it will issue a load request, which will first look for local images on-disk and then consult the QNetworkDiskCache and if found, use the stored binary data from the network cache to populate the in-memory pixmap cache under the card's cache key. If it is not found, it will then proceed with issuing a network request.
The size of both of these caches can be configured by the user in the "Card Sources" settings page.
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1.14.0
