Get Selected Image File Location in Android

I am currently making an app which works with images. I need to implement functionality where the user picks a file stored on the SD card. Once they pick the picture (using the Android gallery), the the file-location of the image will be sent to another Activity, where other work will be done upon it.

I have seen similar posts here on SO, but none to answer my question specifically. Basically this is the code I am doing when the user clicks the "Load a Picture" button:

// Create a new Intent to open the picture selector:
Intent loadPicture = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_PICK, android.provider.MediaStore.Images.Media.EXTERNAL_CONTENT_URI)开发者_开发百科;

// To start it, run the startActivityForResult() method:
startActivityForResult(loadPicture, SELECT_IMAGE);

From that code, I then have a onActivityResult() method to listen to the call-back:

// If the user tried to select an image:
if(requestCode == SELECT_IMAGE)
{
    // Check if the user actually selected an image:
    if(resultCode == Activity.RESULT_OK)
    {
        // This gets the URI of the image the user selected:
        Uri selectedImage = data.getData();

        // Create a new Intent to send to the next Activity:
        Intent i = new Intent(currentActivty.this, nextActivity.class);

        // ----------------- Problem Area -----------------
        // I would like to send the filename to the Intent object, and send it over.
        // However, the selectedImage.toString() method will return a
        // "content://" string instead of a file location.  How do I get a file
        // location from that URI object?
        i.putExtra("PICTURE_LOCATION", selectedImage.toString());

        // Start the activity outlined with the Intent above:
        startActivity(i);

As the code above states, the uri.toString() will return a content:// string instead of the file location of the selected picture. How do I obtain the file location?

Note: Another possible solution is to send over the content:// string and convert that into a Bitmap (which is what happens in the next Activity). However, I don't know how to do that.

I have found the answer to my own question. After doing some more searching, I finally stumbled upon a post here on SO which asks the same question here: android get real path by Uri.getPath().

Unfortunately, the answer has a broken link. After some Google searching, I found the correct link to the site here: http://www.androidsnippets.org/snippets/130/ (I have verified that this code does indeed work.)

However, I decided to take a different route. Since my next Activity is using an ImageView to display the picture, I am instead going to use the Uri content string for all methods that link to the next Activity.

In the next Activity, I am using the ImageView.setImageUri() method.

Here is the code I am doing in the next Activity to display the picture from the content:// string:

// Get the content string from the previous Activity:
picLocation = getIntent().getStringExtra("PICTURE_LOCATION");

// Instantiate the ImageView object:
ImageView imageViewer = (ImageView)findViewById(R.id.ImageViewer);

// Convert the Uri string into a usable Uri:
Uri temp = Uri.parse(picLocation);
imageViewer.setImageURI(temp);

I hope that this question and answer will be helpful to future Android developers.

Here's another answer that I hope someone finds useful:

You can do this for any content in the MediaStore. In my app, I have to get the path from URIs and get the URI from paths. The former:

/**
 * Gets the corresponding path to a file from the given content:// URI
 * @param selectedVideoUri The content:// URI to find the file path from
 * @param contentResolver The content resolver to use to perform the query.
 * @return the file path as a string
 */
private String getFilePathFromContentUri(Uri selectedVideoUri,
        ContentResolver contentResolver) {
    String filePath;
    String[] filePathColumn = {MediaColumns.DATA};

    Cursor cursor = contentResolver.query(selectedVideoUri, filePathColumn, null, null, null);
    cursor.moveToFirst();

    int columnIndex = cursor.getColumnIndex(filePathColumn[0]);
    filePath = cursor.getString(columnIndex);
    cursor.close();
    return filePath;
}

The latter (which I do for videos, but can also be used for Audio or Files or other types of stored content by substituting MediaStore.Audio (etc) for MediaStore.Video:

/**
 * Gets the MediaStore video ID of a given file on external storage
 * @param filePath The path (on external storage) of the file to resolve the ID of
 * @param contentResolver The content resolver to use to perform the query.
 * @return the video ID as a long
 */
private long getVideoIdFromFilePath(String filePath,
        ContentResolver contentResolver) {


    long videoId;
    Log.d(TAG,"Loading file " + filePath);

            // This returns us content://media/external/videos/media (or something like that)
            // I pass in "external" because that's the MediaStore's name for the external
            // storage on my device (the other possibility is "internal")
    Uri videosUri = MediaStore.Video.Media.getContentUri("external");

    Log.d(TAG,"videosUri = " + videosUri.toString());

    String[] projection = {MediaStore.Video.VideoColumns._ID};

    // TODO This will break if we have no matching item in the MediaStore.
    Cursor cursor = contentResolver.query(videosUri, projection, MediaStore.Video.VideoColumns.DATA + " LIKE ?", new String[] { filePath }, null);
    cursor.moveToFirst();

    int columnIndex = cursor.getColumnIndex(projection[0]);
    videoId = cursor.getLong(columnIndex);

    Log.d(TAG,"Video ID is " + videoId);
    cursor.close();
    return videoId;
}

Basically, the DATA column of MediaStore (or whichever sub-section of it you're querying) stores the file path, so you use what you know to look up the DATA, or you query on the DATA field to select the content you care about.