How do I load a contact Photo?

android, contactscontract

Solution

Having scanned the many questions and answers to the problem of displaying a thumbnail I thought I would post my solution to this particular conundrum as I could only find a couple that worked at all and none that provided a good canned solution for the lazy developer.

The class below takes a Context, QuickContactBadge and a telephone number and will attach a locally stored image to the badge if there is one available for the specified phone number.

Here's the class:

public final class QuickContactHelper {

private static final String[] PHOTO_ID_PROJECTION = new String[] {
    ContactsContract.Contacts.PHOTO_ID
};

private static final String[] PHOTO_BITMAP_PROJECTION = new String[] {
    ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Photo.PHOTO
};

private final QuickContactBadge badge;

private final String phoneNumber;

private final ContentResolver contentResolver;

public QuickContactHelper(final Context context, final QuickContactBadge badge, final String phoneNumber) {

    this.badge = badge;
    this.phoneNumber = phoneNumber;
    contentResolver = context.getContentResolver();

}

public void addThumbnail() {

    final Integer thumbnailId = fetchThumbnailId();
    if (thumbnailId != null) {
        final Bitmap thumbnail = fetchThumbnail(thumbnailId);
        if (thumbnail != null) {
            badge.setImageBitmap(thumbnail);
        }
    }

}

private Integer fetchThumbnailId() {

    final Uri uri = Uri.withAppendedPath(ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Phone.CONTENT_FILTER_URI, Uri.encode(phoneNumber));
    final Cursor cursor = contentResolver.query(uri, PHOTO_ID_PROJECTION, null, null, ContactsContract.Contacts.DISPLAY_NAME + " ASC");

    try {
        Integer thumbnailId = null;
        if (cursor.moveToFirst()) {
            thumbnailId = cursor.getInt(cursor.getColumnIndex(ContactsContract.Contacts.PHOTO_ID));
        }
        return thumbnailId;
    }
    finally {
        cursor.close();
    }

}

final Bitmap fetchThumbnail(final int thumbnailId) {

    final Uri uri = ContentUris.withAppendedId(ContactsContract.Data.CONTENT_URI, thumbnailId);
    final Cursor cursor = contentResolver.query(uri, PHOTO_BITMAP_PROJECTION, null, null, null);

    try {
        Bitmap thumbnail = null;
        if (cursor.moveToFirst()) {
            final byte[] thumbnailBytes = cursor.getBlob(0);
            if (thumbnailBytes != null) {
                thumbnail = BitmapFactory.decodeByteArray(thumbnailBytes, 0, thumbnailBytes.length);
            }
        }
        return thumbnail;
    }
    finally {
        cursor.close();
    }

}

}

And here's a typical use case inside an activity:

String phoneNumber = "...";
QuickContactBadge badge = (QuickContactBadge) view.findViewById(R.id.friend);
new QuickContactHelper(this, badge, phoneNumber).addThumbnail();

In a fragment it will be slightly different:

String phoneNumber = "...";
QuickContactBadge badge = (QuickContactBadge) view.findViewById(R.id.friend);
new QuickContactHelper(getActivity(), badge, phoneNumber).addThumbnail();

Now there are ways to be more efficient - for example if you are rendering a message timeline you'd want to re-use the same bitmap object for every badge instance for a given phone number instead of constantly creating new helper class instances and re-retrieving the bitmap - but my purpose here was to post a solution that is stripped down to the absolute minimum for clarity whilst at the same time providing a complete and usable solution out of the box. This solution has been built and tested on Andriod 4.0, and tested on 4.1 as well.

Problem

Original source

Related problems

• Android - Get Contact Photo from phone number