So, I’ve had a rough few days, and by rough, I’m talking about the equivilant of a goats knee kinda rough. And if you haven’t guessed it yet, it has to do with the Samsung Galaxy Tab(the 7 inch guy), and null intents when using the camera from inside your app.
Let me set the scene, first, and tell you my story. I was über excited to recieve my very own “work purchased” Samsung galaxy tablet yesterday, to be used for, among other things, developing some Android applications. I couldn’t contain my excitement, and this was way more fun than filling in my timesheets, so, I cracked the sucker open and began developing a little something that basically made use of the camera functionality. So I initially set off to create a test Activity which had a Gallery control, and a button to activate the camera. All I wanted to do was create a sample app, which would populate the gallery with the photos that I’d take. However, I couldn’t help but be reminded of how similar grappling with the camera functionality on the Samsung Galaxy tab is issuing a command to my ridgeback dog Bruno. Neither of them does what you expect it to! Instead, you’re just left surprised while it does its own crazy thing! 🙂
So in my example, I thought I’d try something simple. Just start the camera activity with the method call to startActivityForResult, and in the method onActivityResult, when the camera returns, I expected to be able to get both the thumbnail and the actual image in the intent’s data. Alas, this is not the case. It appears that if you populate the EXTRA_OUTPUT extra with a URI of where to store the new photo, then the camera will store the photo there for you. Now in my experience, this is true, however, with a little annoying caveat. Not only will the camera store it in the URI location that you supplied, but it also stores it in the default location of its own!
I had another problem. I wanted not only the thumbnail, but also the actual image. For the purpose of this, I didn’t really need the actual image, but more the location of where I could go and get it. Now when using the method I just previously spoke about, by providing the EXTRA_OUTPUT extra on the request intent, the camera on return to the onActivityResult, ends up passing back a NULL intent, which used to have the thumbnail image in the extra key called “data“. Now you have diddley squat!
Yet another problem I faced was that, the URI I was passing in the request intent, to tell the camera where to save this image, always ended up being NULL when the onActivityResult method was called. So now, not only do I have to somehow persist the URI that I had already passed into the request intent (to prevent it from becoming null), I now also didn’t have a thumbnail to speak of – which I used to get from the “data” extra in the return intent.
Plan B…..
It seemed that from all my reading, the best way was to create a temp file, that always had a deterministic name and location, create the file, then create a URI from that, and pass that as part of the request intent, and you could reconstruct the URI when the onActivityResult was called. Thats great, but where’s my thumbnail? Still not there? <sarcasm>Nice!</sarcasm>
Plan C….
So this is what I eventually had to resort to, in order to get both the thumbnail, AND actual image location in order to populate my gallery control with the thumbnails, and retain the actual image location so that I could display it when the user tapped on the thumbnail, and thereby also avoiding any duplicate images being stored :
Call the Camera activity as per normal Don’t do anything fancy, just create the intent with the ACTION_IMAGE_CAPTURE constant. That way, you don’t create duplicate images all over the place.
On the return call of onActivityResult, you need to do a managedQuery on the MediaStore.Images.Thumbnails.EXTERNAL_CONTENT_URI and MediaStore.Images.Media.EXTERNAL_CONTENT_URI locations, and selecting the last image that was captured. This way, you are able to obtain a handle to both the thumbnail, and the image without having to deal with all the weirdness of before. Once you have these, then you’re good to go! I’ve posted some sample code below to show you what I’m talking about.
private static final int CAMERA_IMAGE_CAPTURE = 0;
public void btnTakePhoto_onClick(View view){
Intent intent = new Intent(MediaStore.ACTION_IMAGE_CAPTURE);
startActivityForResult(intent, CAMERA_IMAGE_CAPTURE);
}
@Override
protected void onActivityResult(int requestCode, int resultCode, Intent data) {
super.onActivityResult(requestCode, resultCode, data);
if(requestCode==CAMERA_IMAGE_CAPTURE && resultCode==Activity.RESULT_OK){
// Describe the columns you'd like to have returned. Selecting from the Thumbnails location gives you both the Thumbnail Image ID, as well as the original image ID
String[] projection = {
MediaStore.Images.Thumbnails._ID, // The columns we want
MediaStore.Images.Thumbnails.IMAGE_ID,
MediaStore.Images.Thumbnails.KIND,
MediaStore.Images.Thumbnails.DATA};
String selection = MediaStore.Images.Thumbnails.KIND + "=" + // Select only mini's
MediaStore.Images.Thumbnails.MINI_KIND;
String sort = MediaStore.Images.Thumbnails._ID + " DESC";
//At the moment, this is a bit of a hack, as I'm returning ALL images, and just taking the latest one. There is a better way to narrow this down I think with a WHERE clause which is currently the selection variable
Cursor myCursor = this.managedQuery(MediaStore.Images.Thumbnails.EXTERNAL_CONTENT_URI, projection, selection, null, sort);
long imageId = 0l;
long thumbnailImageId = 0l;
String thumbnailPath = "";
try{
myCursor.moveToFirst();
imageId = myCursor.getLong(myCursor.getColumnIndexOrThrow(MediaStore.Images.Thumbnails.IMAGE_ID));
thumbnailImageId = myCursor.getLong(myCursor.getColumnIndexOrThrow(MediaStore.Images.Thumbnails._ID));
thumbnailPath = myCursor.getString(myCursor.getColumnIndexOrThrow(MediaStore.Images.Thumbnails.DATA));
}
finally{myCursor.close();}
//Create new Cursor to obtain the file Path for the large image
String[] largeFileProjection = {
MediaStore.Images.ImageColumns._ID,
MediaStore.Images.ImageColumns.DATA
};
String largeFileSort = MediaStore.Images.ImageColumns._ID + " DESC";
myCursor = this.managedQuery(MediaStore.Images.Media.EXTERNAL_CONTENT_URI, largeFileProjection, null, null, largeFileSort);
String largeImagePath = "";
try{
myCursor.moveToFirst();
//This will actually give yo uthe file path location of the image.
largeImagePath = myCursor.getString(myCursor.getColumnIndexOrThrow(MediaStore.Images.ImageColumns.DATA));
}
finally{myCursor.close();}
// These are the two URI's you'll be interested in. They give you a handle to the actual images
Uri uriLargeImage = Uri.withAppendedPath(MediaStore.Images.Media.EXTERNAL_CONTENT_URI, String.valueOf(imageId));
Uri uriThumbnailImage = Uri.withAppendedPath(MediaStore.Images.Thumbnails.EXTERNAL_CONTENT_URI, String.valueOf(thumbnailImageId));
// I've left out the remaining code, as all I do is assign the URI's to my own objects anyways...
}
}
I hope this helps someone else out there, cause this had me baffeled for a while. I don’t know what this just can’t be easier. Surely there’s no need to have to jump through hoops like this. Anyhoo, I’m working on getting the better managed query working, and I’ll just use this when I need it. It seems to work for the most part anyway.
Kevin Potgieter 