Capacitor Media

@capacitor-community/media

Capacitor plugin for saving and retrieving photos and videos, and managing photo albums.

Sponsors

Chatness AI

Maintainers

Maintainer	GitHub	Social
Nisala Kalupahana	nkalupahana
Stewan Silva	stewones	@stewones

Installation

npm install @capacitor-community/media

This plugin is currently for Capacitor 6. Add an @5 at the end to install for Capacitor 5. Note that the Capacitor 5 version is no longer maintained, and cannot be published to the Google Play Store.

After installing, be sure to sync by running ionic cap sync.

Migrating to v7

There has been a breaking change to the way permissions are handled on Android.

• If your app is not a "gallery" app (does not need access to all photo albums on the device, just its own), you no longer need the READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE, WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE, READ_MEDIA_IMAGES, or READ_MEDIA_VIDEO permissions. You can remove them from your AndroidManifest.xml file. The plugin will no longer request any permissions to save images to your app's albums.
• If your app is a gallery app and you need access to all albums on the device, you'll need to update your capacitor.config.ts file (and keep all of the above permissions) -- see the setup instructions below.

You will need to update to v7 to publish an app with this plugin on the Google Play Store.

Migrating to Capacitor 6

There are a few breaking changes to take note of:

• saveGif no longer exists. Use savePhoto for images and GIFs.
• Error text has been changed. If you were checking for specific error messages, you should now use error.code, which will be accessDenied, argumentError, downloadError, or filesystemError.

Setup

iOS

You'll need to add the following to your app's Info.plist file:

<dict>
  ...
  <key>NSPhotoLibraryUsageDescription</key>
  <string>Describe why you need access to user's photos (getting albums and media)</string>
  <key>NSPhotoLibraryAddUsageDescription</key>
  <string>Describe why you need to add photos to user's photo library</string>
  ...
</dict>

Android

By default, this plugin only has access to the albums associated with the app it's installed in. This should be enough for most use cases. For this basic level of access, you only need to add the following permission:

<manifest>
  ...
  <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET" />
  ...
</manifest>

If you're building an app that needs to access all photos and videos on the device (e.g. a photo gallery app), you'll need the following permissions:

<manifest>
  ...
  <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET" />
  <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE" />
  <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE" />
  <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.READ_MEDIA_IMAGES" />
  <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.READ_MEDIA_VIDEO" />
  ...

You'll also need to add the following configuration to capacitor.config.ts:

plugins: {
  Media: {
    androidGalleryMode: true
  }
}

You can find an example of how this should look in the example/ folder.

Demo

Go the the example/ folder to play with an example app that should show all functionality of this plugin.

API

Unless otherwise noted, there should be full feature parity between iOS and Android. Web is not supported.

• getMedias(...)
• getMediaByIdentifier(...)
• getAlbums()
• savePhoto(...)
• saveVideo(...)
• createAlbum(...)
• getAlbumsPath()
• Interfaces
• Type Aliases
• Enums

getMedias(...)

getMedias(options?: MediaFetchOptions | undefined) => Promise<MediaResponse>

Get filtered thumbnails from camera roll. iOS only.

Code Examples

Param	Type
options	MediaFetchOptions

Returns: Promise<MediaResponse>

---

getMediaByIdentifier(...)

getMediaByIdentifier(options?: { identifier: string; } | undefined) => Promise<MediaPath>

Get a filesystem path to a full-quality media asset by its identifier. iOS only. This is not included for Android because on Android, a media asset's identifier IS its path! You can simply use the Filesystem plugin to work with it. On iOS, you have to turn the identifier into a path using this function. After that, you can use the Filesystem plugin, same as Android.

Code Examples

Param	Type
options	{ identifier: string; }

Returns: Promise<MediaPath>

---

getAlbums()

getAlbums() => Promise<MediaAlbumResponse>

Get list of albums.

Code Examples

Returns: Promise<MediaAlbumResponse>

---

savePhoto(...)

savePhoto(options?: MediaSaveOptions | undefined) => Promise<PhotoResponse>

Saves a still photo or GIF to the camera roll.

On Android and iOS, this supports web URLs, base64 encoded images (e.g. data:image/jpeg;base64,...), and local files. On Android, all image formats supported by the user's photo viewer are supported. On iOS, most common image formats are supported.

Code Examples

Param	Type
options	MediaSaveOptions

Returns: Promise<PhotoResponse>

---

saveVideo(...)

saveVideo(options?: MediaSaveOptions | undefined) => Promise<PhotoResponse>

Saves a video to the camera roll.

On Android and iOS, this supports web URLs, base64 encoded videos (e.g. data:image/mp4;base64,...), and local files. On Android, all video formats supported by the user's photo viewer are supported. On iOS, the supported formats are based on whatever iOS supports at the time.

Code Examples

Param	Type
options	MediaSaveOptions

Returns: Promise<PhotoResponse>

---

createAlbum(...)

createAlbum(options: MediaAlbumCreate) => Promise<void>

Creates an album.

Code Examples

Param	Type
options	MediaAlbumCreate

---

getAlbumsPath()

getAlbumsPath() => Promise<AlbumsPathResponse>

Gets the path where album folders and their corresponding photos are stored on the Android filesystem. This can be used to identify your album by more than just its name on Android, in case there are multiple albums with the same name, which is possible on Android. Just compare the albums path to the start of the album identifier when getting albums.

Only available on Android.

Code Examples: basic, when saving media

Returns: Promise<AlbumsPathResponse>

---

Interfaces

MediaResponse

Prop	Type
medias	MediaAsset[]

MediaAsset

Prop	Type	Description
identifier	string	Platform-specific identifier
data	string	Data for a photo asset as a base64 encoded string (JPEG only supported)
creationDate	string	ISO date string for creation date of asset
duration	number	Duration of asset in seconds, only returned for videos
fullWidth	number	Full width of original asset
fullHeight	number	Full height of original asset
thumbnailWidth	number	Width of thumbnail preview
thumbnailHeight	number	Height of thumbnail preview
location	MediaLocation	Location metadata for the asset

MediaLocation

Prop	Type	Description
latitude	number	GPS latitude image was taken at
longitude	number	GPS longitude image was taken at
heading	number	Heading of user at time image was taken
altitude	number	Altitude of user at time image was taken
speed	number	Speed of user at time image was taken

MediaFetchOptions

Prop	Type	Description
quantity	number	The number of photos to fetch, sorted by last created date descending. To paginate, just request a higher quantity -- OS caching should make this relatively performant.
thumbnailWidth	number	The width of thumbnail to return
thumbnailHeight	number	The height of thumbnail to return
thumbnailQuality	number	The quality of thumbnail to return as JPEG (0-100)
types	'photos' | 'videos' | 'all'	Which types of assets to return thumbnails for.
albumIdentifier	string	Which album identifier to query in (get identifier with getAlbums())
sort	MediaField | MediaSort[]	Sort order of returned assets by field and ascending/descending

MediaSort

Prop	Type
key	MediaField
ascending	boolean

MediaPath

Prop	Type	Description
path	string	Path to media asset
identifier	string	Identifier for media asset

MediaAlbumResponse

Prop	Type
albums	MediaAlbum[]

MediaAlbum

Prop	Type
identifier	string
name	string
type	MediaAlbumType

PhotoResponse

Prop	Type	Description
filePath	string	Available on Android only.

MediaSaveOptions

Prop	Type	Description
path	string	Web URL, base64 encoded URI, or local file path to save.
albumIdentifier	string	Album identifier from getAlbums(). Since 5.0, identifier is used on both Android and iOS. Identifier is required on Android but not on iOS. On iOS 14+, if the identifier is not specified and no permissions have been requested yet, add-only permissions will be requested instead of full permissions (assuming NSPhotoLibraryAddUsageDescription is in Info.plist).
fileName	string	File name to save the image as in the album. Do not include extension. Android only.

MediaAlbumCreate

Prop	Type
name	string

AlbumsPathResponse

Prop	Type
path	string

Type Aliases

MediaField

Attributes to sort media by.

iOS Source

'mediaType' | 'mediaSubtypes' | 'sourceType' | 'pixelWidth' | 'pixelHeight' | 'creationDate' | 'modificationDate' | 'isFavorite' | 'burstIdentifier'

Enums

MediaAlbumType

Members	Value	Description
Smart	'smart'	Album is a "smart" album (such as Favorites or Recently Added)
Shared	'shared'	Album is a cloud-shared album
User	'user'	Album is a user-created album

Contributors ✨

Thanks goes to these wonderful people (emoji key):

stewones 💻 📖 🚧	Zachary Keeton 💻	Pierre Grimaud 📖	Talles Alves 🚧	Zyad Yasser 🚧
Manuel Rodríguez 💻 🚧	Michael 💻	Nisala Kalupahana 💻 📖 💡 🚧	Masahiko Sakakibara 🚧	ha6-6ru 💻
Stephan Fischer 💻	Matheus Davidson 💻 📖

This project follows the all-contributors specification. Contributions of any kind welcome!