Easy Image Chooser Library for Android

      5 Comments on Easy Image Chooser Library for Android

In almost all the Android apps that I have worked on, there has been a requirement for choosing an image or taking a snap and using the device’s camera.

Taking a snap, is rather straightforward to implement, but choosing an image from your gallery is sometimes a hard nut to crack. And to implement this correctly, you would always end up writing a lot of code. Assuming that you want to target all OSes, devices, folders etc.

For example, choosing a picture from the Camera folder of your phone is nice and easy. But, if you want to have the user chose an image from one of his picasa web albums, which he has synced on his phone, you will find a dead-end. Well, almost.

For myself, I must have at-least rewritten the same code, multiple number of times. Of course, the platform should help us in achieving this seemingly straightforward feature with as less code as possible. But, right now, it’s not possible.

So, I thought of creating a library which anyone could integrate within one’s own app, without really worrying about the nitty-gritties and the bugs, to implement or add this feature into his app. And there’s more. Most of the time, you would need a scaled down version of the chosen image to show a preview or use it in a listview. This library would give you 3 sizes, as of now.

  1. Original Size
  2. Thumbnail Size
  3. Thumbnail Smaller Size
The sizes are dynamically calculated, based on the original size of the image. It’s pretty rough here, but I am looking forward to improve that part.
This version of the library is pretty basic. But, I would be working on improving this library to add more functionality in the future.
You can find more information about this library here.
By using this library in the current state, you could handle all these cases/special cases with just a few lines of code. An example of this is shown below.
Usage:
1. For choosing an image from gallery

imageChooserManager = new ImageChooserManager(this, ChooserType.REQUEST_PICK_PICTURE);
imageChooserManager.setImageChooserListener(this);
imageChooserManager.choose();

2. For capturing a picture using your camera

imageChooserManager = new ImageChooserManager(this, ChooserType.REQUEST_CAPTURE_PICTURE);
imageChooserManager.setImageChooserListener(this);
imageChooserManager.choose();

3. On Activity result, do this:

@Override
protected void onActivityResult(int requestCode, int resultCode, Intent data) {
if (resultCode == RESULT_OK &&
(requestCode == ChooserType.REQUEST_PICK_PICTURE||
requestCode == ChooserType.REQUEST_CAPTURE_PICTURE)) {
imageChooserManager.submit(requestCode, data);
}
}

4. Implement the ImageChooserListener interface and override these methods:

@Override
public void onImageChosen(final ChosenImage image) {
runOnUiThread(new Runnable() {
@Override
public void run() {
if (image != null) {
// Use the image
// image.getFilePathOriginal();
// image.getFileThumbnail();
// image.getFileThumbnailSmall();
}
}
});
}
@Override
public void onError(final String reason) {
runOnUiThread(new Runnable() {
@Override
public void run() {
// Show error message
}
});
}

That’s all you need to code. And the library takes care of handling all kinds of images, and also generates 2 thumbnails which you could directly use. Let me know if you need to add any new features or if you find a bug. I will try to address those as soon as humanly possible. If you would like to contribute to this project, drop me a mail.

5 thoughts on “Easy Image Chooser Library for Android”

  2. Pingback: Easy Video Chooser Library for Android | Techdroid

Leave a Reply