How to capture an Android Camera image without saving a file to the phone/sdcard?

Question

I would like to capture an image with the Android Camera but because the image may contain sensitive data I dont want the image saved to the phone or sd card. Instead I would like a base64 string (compressed) which would be sent to the server immediately

In PhoneGap it seems files are saved to various places automatically. Natively I was never able to get the image stream - in onJpegPictureTaken() the byte[] parameter was always null.

can anyone suggest a way?

Answer 1

See Camera.onPreviewFrame() and the YuvImage.compresstoJpeg() to be able to get a byte array you can convert into a bitmap.

Note that YuvImage.compressToJpeg() is only available in SDK 8 or later, I think. For earlier versions you'll need to implement your own YUV decoder. There are several examples around or, I could provide you an example.

Those two methods will allow you to get a camera picture in memory and never persist it to SD. Beware that bitmaps of most camera preview sizes will chew up memory pretty quickly and you'll need to be very careful to recycle the bitmaps and probably also have to scale them down a bit to do much with them and still fit inside the native heap restrictions on most devices.

Good luck!