Question

I am developing a chatting/messaging app and I want to let the user select an image that they’ve stored online (i.e. picasa, photobucket, flickr, etc) which will be shown as part of the chat User Interface for anyone that is chatting with the user.

For example:

• User_A is messaging/chatting with
  User_B.

• User_B will see a small thumbnail
  image of User_A

• User_A will see a small thumbnail of
  User_B.

  note: my web server is facilitating the text exchange between the two users.

At first I thought I would implement a photo upload function in my app and store the photo’s on my server that each client would download. But then I realized that this is just re-inventing the wheel because there are now a lot of online picture sharing services.
So I want my server to simply store the URL of the images that User_A and User_B have selected – my app is notified of the URL’s and downloads the pictures.

However, how is this implemented ? (Specifically, the image selection to obtain the URL in a userfriendly manner)

I’ve visualized the following userfriendly use-case…

• user opens the options activity in my
  app and pushes the button to select
  an image to present in the chat UI.

• an intent dialog is shown with all of
  the possible image hosting services
  installed on the mobile phone
  (picasa, photobucket, etc) – but
  local storage shall not be shown.

• the image picker of the chosen
  application is shown and the user
  chooses the image.

• the image picker closes and returns
  the URL to my app.

If this can’t be implemented, then my only alternative (that I know of) is to have users copy’n’paste the URL of the image they want to use – which is not userfriendly on mobile devices.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

That doesn’t seem very difficult to me.
You can predefine which Image hosting services you wish to use.
Picassa and Flickr have their APIs AFAIK.

• Present user with an option to choose from your predefined offerings.
• When they choose, present the album of the user.
• When the user ends up selecting an image, Image hosting will let you know about their URLs (You can download all images of that album and display them natively in your app, it will fetch information about them, like their URL with them, which will be easy to track)
• Get the URL, and update the chat webservice about it.
• Create the Chat activity in a way that it polls your webservice after a particular interval to check whether any one of both the users involved in chat have changed their images. If they have, load the new one.

I can detail you on this if you have any doubts.