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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-27T01:42:44+00:00

I’m using webview.capturePicture() to create a Picture object that contains all the drawing objects

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I’m using webview.capturePicture() to create a Picture object that contains all the drawing objects for a webpage.

I can successfully render this Picture object to a bitmap using the canvas.drawPicture(picture, dst) with no problems.
However when I use picture.writeToStream(fos) to serialize the picture object out to file, and then
Picture.createFromStream(fis) to read the data back in and create a new picture object, the resultant bitmap when rendered as above is missing any larger images (anything over around 20KB! by observation).

This occurs on all the Android OS platforms that I have tested 1.5, 1.6 and 2.1.
Looking at the native code for Skia which is the underlying Android graphics library and the output file produced from the picture.writeToStream() I can see how the file format is constructed.
I can see that some of the images in this Skia spool file are not being written out (the larger ones), the code that appears to be the problem is in skBitmap.cpp in the method 

void SkBitmap::flatten(SkFlattenableWriteBuffer& buffer) const;

It writes out the bitmap fWidth, fHeight, fRowBytes, FConfig and isOpaque values but then just writes out SERIALIZE_PIXELTYPE_NONE (0). This means that the spool file does not contain any pixel information about the actual image and therefore cannot restore the picture object correctly.

Effectively this renders the writeToStream and createFromStream() APIs useless as they do not reliably store and recreate the picture data.

Has anybody else seen this behaviour and if so am I using the API incorrectly, can it be worked around, is there an explanation i.e. incomplete API / bug and if so are there any plans for a fix in a future release of Android?

Thanks in advance.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    On the Honeycomb platform it appears that writeToStream() and createFromStream() now store and recreate the Picture object including large image data.

    However it does come with the following caveats:

    • The image data used in a picture must be of an immutable type.
    • The image data must have been created with the following BitmapFactory.Options set to true, inInputShareable and inPurgeable. This can be done by using BitmapFactory.decodeResource() passing in the BitmapFactory.Options.

    It so happens that Pictures created by WebView ‘do’ contain suitable images that meet this criteria and therefore can be serialized and restored.

    I have not confirmed as yet that Ice Cream Sandwich also works but I am assuming/hoping that it will.

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