Image Picker plugin for Flutter

December 13, 2019 Plugin

A Flutter plugin for iOS and Android for picking images from the image library, and taking new pictures with the camera.

Installation

First, add image_picker as a dependency in your pubspec.yaml file.

iOS

Add the following keys to your Info.plist file, located in <project root>/ios/Runner/Info.plist:

NSPhotoLibraryUsageDescription – describe why your app needs permission for the photo library. This is called Privacy – Photo Library Usage Description in the visual editor.
NSCameraUsageDescription – describe why your app needs access to the camera. This is called Privacy – Camera Usage Description in the visual editor.
NSMicrophoneUsageDescription – describe why your app needs access to the microphone, if you intend to record videos. This is called Privacy – Microphone Usage Description in the visual editor.

Android

No configuration required – the plugin should work out of the box.

Example

import 'package:image_picker/image_picker.dart';

class MyHomePage extends StatefulWidget {
  @override
  _MyHomePageState createState() => _MyHomePageState();
}

class _MyHomePageState extends State<MyHomePage> {
  File _image;

  Future getImage() async {
    var image = await ImagePicker.pickImage(source: ImageSource.camera);

    setState(() {
      _image = image;
    });
  }

  @override
  Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    return Scaffold(
      appBar: AppBar(
        title: Text('Image Picker Example'),
      ),
      body: Center(
        child: _image == null
            ? Text('No image selected.')
            : Image.file(_image),
      ),
      floatingActionButton: FloatingActionButton(
        onPressed: getImage,
        tooltip: 'Pick Image',
        child: Icon(Icons.add_a_photo),
      ),
    );
  }
}

Handling MainActivity destruction on Android

Android system — although very rarely — sometimes kills the MainActivity after the image_picker finishes. When this happens, we lost the data selected from the image_picker. You can use retrieveLostData to retrieve the lost data in this situation. For example:

Future<void> retrieveLostData() async {
  final LostDataResponse response =
      await ImagePicker.retrieveLostData();
  if (response == null) {
    return;
  }
  if (response.file != null) {
    setState(() {
      if (response.type == RetrieveType.video) {
        _handleVideo(response.file);
      } else {
        _handleImage(response.file);
      }
    });
  } else {
    _handleError(response.exception);
  }
}

There’s no way to detect when this happens, so calling this method at the right place is essential. We recommend to wire this into some kind of start-up check. Please refer to the example app to see how we used it.