Determine Mime type of a uri in android returned by an intent?

Vinayak Bhavnani picture Vinayak Bhavnani · Mar 23, 2013 · Viewed 10k times · Source

First some context of what I am trying to achieve -

I am developing an Image Sharing application for which I need the user to pick an image from the filesystem .

For this , I am using this code -

    Intent photoPickerIntent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_GET_CONTENT);
    photoPickerIntent.setType("image/*");
    startActivityForResult(photoPickerIntent, REQUEST_CODE_IMAGE_PICKER_INTENT);

Now , this triggers a chooser wherein I see multiple options including Gallery and a FileManager App that I have in my phone. If i select gallery and choose an image from there then my Activity receives an Intent with a content uri of an Image. But if I choose the FileManager App , I can choose any file which might not be an image . So , what I need is to be able to determine the mime type of the uri returned in the intent. The intent's getType method returns null .

Is there any way to determine the mime from the returned intent to be able to determine if the content is an image or not .

If this doesn't work this way , then I might have to use MimeTypeMap to determine the mime from the file extension.

Answer

Vinayak Bhavnani picture Vinayak Bhavnani · Mar 29, 2013

I found a way to get the mime type of a content uri but nothing worked for other kind of uri's such as uri's of the form 'file://.....' .

To get the mime type of content uri's -

    ContentResolver cr = this.getContentResolver();
    String mime = cr.getType(YOUR_CONTENT_URI);

This works only for content uri's . So for other uri's I am using MimeTypeMap to infer their mime type's from the file extension .