Question

Is it possible to read and write to the gallery on Android?
I want to be able to get a list of all images in the gallery, and store those images onto a server. I also want to be able to download the images from the server and save them into the gallery. Is that possible?

I can’t seem to find the API for doing this, so it would be great if you could point me in the right direction! Thank you!

Answer 1

You can read from the gallery using the ContentResolver.query() method. For example:

Cursor c = getContentResolver().query( Images.Media.EXTERNAL_CONTENT_URI, IMAGES_PROJECTION, null, null, Images.Media.DEFAULT_SORT_ORDER );

This will give you a Cursor to all photos in the database. IMAGES_PROJECTION is a String[] of columns you are interested in getting values from. These columns are listed in Images.ImageColumns.

To get the Bitmap for each image in the gallery, you need to get the _ID value for each row in the cursor, then call this:

Images.Media.getBitmap( getContentResolver(), Uri.withAppendedPath( Images.Media.EXTERNAL_CONTENT_URI, Integer.toString( id ) ) );

To write to the content database, you can use:

Images.Media.insertImage( getContentResolver(), bitmap, title, description );

To insert a video is a bit more involved. If you need sample code for that, let me know and I can get that for you also.