Android Gallery on Android 4.4 (KitKat) returns different URI for Intent.ACTION_GET_CONTENT

Question

Before KitKat (or before the new Gallery) the Intent.ACTION_GET_CONTENT returned a URI like this

content://media/external/images/media/39

Answer 1

Building up on Paul Burke's answer I faced many problems resolving external SD card's URI path as most of the suggested "built-in" functions return paths which do not get resolved to files.

However, this is my approach of his // TODO handle non-primary volumes.

String resolvedPath = "";
File[] possibleExtSdComposites = context.getExternalFilesDirs(null);
for (File f : possibleExtSdComposites) {
    // Reset final path
    resolvedPath = "";

    // Construct list of folders
    ArrayList extSdSplit = new ArrayList<>(Arrays.asList(f.getPath().split("/")));

    // Look for folder ""
    int idx = extSdSplit.indexOf(BuildConfig.APPLICATION_ID);

    // ASSUMPTION: Expected to be found at depth 2 (in this case ExtSdCard's root is /storage/0000-0000/) - e.g. /storage/0000-0000/Android/data//files
    ArrayList hierarchyList = new ArrayList<>(extSdSplit.subList(0, idx - 2));

    // Construct list containing full possible path to the file
    hierarchyList.add(tail);
    String possibleFilePath = TextUtils.join("/", hierarchyList);

    // If file is found --> success
    if (idx != -1 && new File(possibleFilePath).exists()) {
        resolvedPath = possibleFilePath;
        break;
    }
}

if (!resolvedPath.equals("")) {
    return resolvedPath;
} else {
    return null;
}

Note it depends on hierarchy which might be different on every phone manufacturer - I have not tested them all (it worked well so far on Xperia Z3 API 23 and Samsung Galaxy A3 API 23).

Please confirm if it does not perform well elsewhere.