Get/pick an image from Android's built-in Gallery app programmatically

Question

I am trying to open an image / picture in the Gallery built-in app from inside my application.

I have a URI of the picture (the picture is located on the SD card).

Answer 1

hcpl's methods work perfectly pre-KitKat, but not working with the DocumentsProvider API. For that just simply follow the official Android tutorial for documentproviders: https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/providers/document-provider.html -> open a document, Bitmap section.

Simply I used hcpl's code and extended it: if the file with the retrieved path to the image throws exception I call this function:

private Bitmap getBitmapFromUri(Uri uri) throws IOException {
        ParcelFileDescriptor parcelFileDescriptor =
             getContentResolver().openFileDescriptor(uri, "r");
        FileDescriptor fileDescriptor = parcelFileDescriptor.getFileDescriptor();
        Bitmap image = BitmapFactory.decodeFileDescriptor(fileDescriptor);
        parcelFileDescriptor.close();
        return image;
}

Tested on Nexus 5.