Another small post, for anyone interested.

A lot of requests were for showing a small thumbnail while uploading a picture. This is all fine and dandy, but I do not have this thumbnail available. There is a thumbnail in the system (the gallery shows them I guess), but there seems to be a problem for certain handsets (HTC Hero ?) with these.

Still, I wanted to use the lovely ‘getThumbnail‘ from MediaStore.Images.Thumbnails, but although much is quite old in that resource, this thumbail functions is ‘Since: API Level 5’. So another workaround needed for the oldscool Android 1.5 development. I’m thinking I might want to move to a newer SDK…

Anyway, I’m making my own thumbnail, pretty simple actually: for a 40×40 thumb:

thumb = Bitmap.createScaledBitmap(myBitmap, 40, 40, false);

Of course I didn’t have a bitmap ready, I just had a URI, but using ‘getBitmap’  you can simply retrieve it. This will use some more memory I guess, but in this case that shouldn’t be a big problem. Final code looks like this:

myBitmap = MediaStore.Images.Media.getBitmap(cr,contentURI);
thumb = Bitmap.createScaledBitmap(myBitmap, 40, 40, false);

As said, it might turn out to be a too big memory hog, but for now this is fine.