Android: MediaStore.Images.Media.EXTERNAL_CONTENT_URI ... show pictures in full size?

Question

Hi there,

I guess this question has been asked before, but I can't seem to find a proper answer/solution.

Have a note-taking app, which allows to take pictures. For that I start an intent, that starts up the built-in camera-app. So far so good.

But when I show that image in my app, it's in a much smaller format :(

The funny/weird thing is, that the camera-app did take a full-resolution picture! But for some reason I can't get the full version to show in my app???

So, when I use the standard Android Gallery app, and go to that picture, it is very obvious that it's full size (I can zoom in and see details I really can't see when I zoom in, in my own app). Also, the dimensions are really those of the original picture, taken with the 5MP camera.

In my app, they are very small. My phone has Android 2.2, but the same happens on my emulator (Android 2.1).

How should I retrieve the pictures in my app??? Tried a couple of ways, but none works :( Don't need a complete example (allthough that's very welcome), just a few clues are enough to search for myself.

Tx in advance!!

Greetingz, Koen<

Answer 1

Very weird, I found the solution/answer by looking at the _ID-values that were being inserted in my own database. First I noticed that when I selected an existing image (via the build-in Android Gallery), I did get the full size image.

When I first took a picture, I got a scaled image. So where was the difference. Apparantly at the location where the _ID of the picture got stored in my database. In my case, and probably most cases, this happens in the onActivityResult procedure.

First take a look at what I initially had:

if(requestCode == REQUEST_CAMERA && resultCode == RESULT_OK){
        String timestamp = Long.toString(System.currentTimeMillis());

        // get the picture
        mPicture = (Bitmap)result.getExtras().get("data");

        //save image to gallery
        String pictureUrl = MediaStore.Images.Media.insertImage(getContentResolver(), mPicture, getResources().getString(R.string.app_name_short), timestamp);
        insertPictureAttachment(mRowId.intValue(), Integer.parseInt(Uri.parse(pictureUrl).getLastPathSegment()));

The "insertPictureAttachment"-method does the actual inserting into the database.

Looking backwards, this was a bit weird anyway ... make a picture, so I could make an URI of it, and then get the last path segment (which is the _ID), so I could insert that into my database.

Eventually, it turns out that I can replace the above code with just one line:

insertPictureAttachment(mRowId.intValue(), Integer.parseInt(result.getData().getLastPathSegment()));

Much shorter, and actually makes more sense ... rather than getting the info from result.getExtras().get("data"), I get my info from result.getData(), which gives the _ID of the original, full-size image.

I will do some further research on this though, cause it's not clear to me yet why I actually don't have to call MediaStore.Images.Media.insertImage(...) ... maybe I will have to if I want specific features (like a custom file location or something like that).

Greetingz, Koen<