Question

I’ve got a situation where I know the path of a file, and address it this way:

File f = new File(Environment.getExternalStorageDirectory(), "image.jpg");

And then create a Uri from it:

Uri uri = Uri.fromFile(f);

However, this Uri prints out something like:

file://.....

But I want:

content://.....

“Why?”. Because some apps are scheme sensitive, like Facebook. If you pass a file-scheme Uri to Facebook when attaching an image, it does nothing. If you pass a content-scheme Uri to the same image, it works perfectly.

So how can I get the content Uri, either by knowing the absolute path, or converting the file-scheme Uri to a content-scheme Uri?

Edit (24th of August 2012): The latest Facebook app update “solved” this by simply removing the picker, and just showing the gallery. You can no longer pick via an intent at all in Facebook.

Answer 1

So far my best bet seems to be this approach of scanning the file, which then returns a Uri with the content-scheme:

File f = new File(Environment.getExternalStorageDirectory(), "image.jpg");

MediaScannerConnection.scanFile(this, new String[]{f.toString()}, null, new MediaScannerConnection.OnScanCompletedListener() {
    public void onScanCompleted(String path, Uri contentUri) {
        // TODO: Do something useful with contentUri, which now has content-scheme
    }
});