Android: Refreshing the Gallery after saving new images

Question

So in my application I at one point save a bunch of images to a temporary folder, and I want them to show up immediately in the Gallery. Off of a reboot, they do, but otherwise they don't.

I've tried using the sendBroadcast method:

 sendBroadcast(new Intent(Intent.ACTION_MEDIA_MOUNTED, 
     Uri.parse("file://" + Environment.getExternalStorageDirectory())));

But I get a permission error:

E/AndroidRuntime( 2628): java.lang.SecurityException: Permission Denial: not allowed to send broadcast android.intent.action.MEDIA_MOUNTED from pid=2628, uid=10068

Could I be missing a permission in my AndroidManifest, or is this just no longer supported? Thanks

Answer 1

Code provided by Petrus in another answer works for me on Kitkat (4.4):

MediaScannerConnection.scanFile(this, new String[] { Environment.getExternalStorageDirectory().toString() }, null, new MediaScannerConnection.OnScanCompletedListener() {
/*
 *   (non-Javadoc)
 * @see android.media.MediaScannerConnection.OnScanCompletedListener#onScanCompleted(java.lang.String, android.net.Uri)
 */
public void onScanCompleted(String path, Uri uri) 
  {
      Log.i("ExternalStorage", "Scanned " + path + ":");
      Log.i("ExternalStorage", "-> uri=" + uri);
  }
    });

Answer 2

I tried Environment.getExternalStorageDirectory().toString(), but it didn't find my custom folder.

I just wanted to share my experience to solving this issue.

At the end, I had MediaScannerConnection configured to scan one file at a time and now missing folder that was holding those images showed up. Every time I download each image, I called MediaScannerConnection and file path as Uri instead of folder itself.

Also, many people asked why sendBroadcast stop working on kitkat and the answer is that sendBroadcast was abused and called too many times and causing system to drain battery or slowdown, so they removed the direct call to prevent abuse which makes sense. I was hoping to use above solution to the folder that hold all images, but it didn't work on the folder. I was hoping that finding folder would expose rest of the files within the custom folder, but it didn't in my case. I am hoping to find better answer in the future...

Here's snippet of my code.

MediaScannerConnection.scanFile(ApplicationContext.context, new String[] { imageFile.getPath() }, null,
              new MediaScannerConnection.OnScanCompletedListener() {
                @Override
                public void onScanCompleted(String path, Uri uri) {
                  Log.i(TAG, "Scanned " + path);
                }
              });