Whether you are a programmer, webmaster, or simply someone who browses the internet, it’s likely you’ll have uploaded images at some point. Content upload accounts for 40 percent of the mobile internet activities of worldwide users, while images play a pivotal role in modern web design by helping users engage with website content and web apps.
For web designers and programmers in particular, there is often a need to programmatically upload images from mobile operating systems such as Android to servers or other operating systems, especially when uploading large numbers of images manually to serve to end users is impractical. Consumers or end users simply need a way to upload files easily to Windows from their Android devices.
Android image upload entails uploading images from Android devices to Windows systems or servers. Both use cases are relevant for all types of user, and in this article you’ll find out about some different methods on how to do them.
Google Photos
Google Photos offers an extremely efficient way to get photos from Android devices onto Windows systems with a minimum of fuss. Users can download the free Google Photos app on their Android phone or tablet, and set it to sync with their Google account. Each time the user takes a new image with their device’s camera, the photo automatically syncs with Google Photos, which is a cloud-based service.
Those same photos can be retrieved on any Windows system by simply accessing the Google Photos service on any modern web browser, such as chrome or Firefox. Similar options include Dropbox and Microsoft OneDrive.
Mylio
Mylio is a free photo-organizer developed by Microsoft that allows users to back up to 500,000 photos for free to Windows from their Android devices. In fact, the software allows you to sync up to 12 different Android devices to Windows.
Mylio also allows you to edit the photos on your device, including the ability to work with RAW files, which is particularly important for photo enthusiasts. RAW files are important for photos that need to be in the highest possible quality.
USB
Connecting your Android to device to Windows via USB might seem old-fashioned, but it offers a stable, reliable, and secure way to upload images from Android to Windows (and vice versa if necessary). The easiest way is to simply dump all your photos into Windows by selecting the “Import photos and videos into the Photos app” option after connecting your device in media transfer mode to Windows.
If you want to be more selective with the photos you upload to windows, you can use good ol’ drag-and-drop by accessing your Android device’s camera folder in Windows explorer by choosing the specific photos you want, and dropping them into a folder on your Windows computer.
Programmatic Upload
Developers will often need a way of hand-coding Android image upload capability into mobile apps so that users of the app can upload a profile picture from their Android gallery or by capturing an image with their camera.
The specific steps for this are beyond the scope of this article, however, a broad description is in Java is as follows:
- Code the appropriate permissions for using the camera. The gallery requires no special permissions.
- Use an Android Intent object to dispatch a camera or retrieve a gallery.
- Retrieve the chosen image using onactivityresult, which is a method for obtaining a result(in this case a saved image) from an activity.
- Upload to Windows server.
Closing Thoughts
Whether you use exciting cloud-based services for uploading from Android to Windows or you opt for the old-fashioned way of doing it and connect via USB, it’s really simple to upload your photos to Windows with the Android OS. Cloud services have the advantages of ensuring photos are synced across many devices and added convenience. USB upload is more secure and doesn’t depend on an internet connection.
For programmers, coding image upload into their Android apps is pretty straightforward, and many good tutorials exist for this online.
