The Chrome team continues evaluating how they’ll implement support for the Android Photo Picker. Recently they added a flag that controls what Picker is launched:
1) ACTION_GET_CONTENT intent
2) ACTION_PICK_IMAGES intent
3) ACTION_PICK_IMAGES “Plus” intent
4) Chrome Picker
- GET_CONTENT is currently handled by DocumentsUI (the system file picker). Google is experimenting with having the new Android Photo Picker “take over” handling of the GET_CONTENT intent. This briefly rolled out in December but was reverted.
- ACTION_PICK_IMAGES intent is the standard way to invoke the framework Photo Picker on Android 11+ (though Chrome stills seems to require Android 13?). Through GMS, Photo Picker is also backported to Android 4.4+
- ACTION_PICK_IMAGES “Plus” is interesting. The MIME type is set to
*/*(ie. all) which Photo Picker does not handle and instead forwards to DocumentsUI. It seems the Chrome team wants the Photo Picker team to add a way to force the Photo Picker to show the “browse” button in the overflow menu; currently this “browse” button only appears when the Photo Picker is invoked through the GET_CONTENT takeover, and tapping it opens the system file picker/DocumentsUI. - I personally think this would be useful; give users the option to open the more feature-rich DocumentsUI, no matter how the Photo Picker is invoked, while still defaulting to the prettier Photo Picker for image/video selection.
- Chrome Picker, just launches the old in-app media picker, which means you have to grant Chrome gallery access permissions.
