Aves albums and Android 16 photo picker albums do not match. Any workarounds?

[drHyperion451]

I've been using Aves for a long time and it's a wonderful app. However, Android 16 has a very dumb simple photo picker tab when you are choosing your home screen picture, when you are choosing a profile pic in contacts... To be more precise is this library: https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/shared/photo-picker

The problem is whenever I create an album using Aves it's just a subfolder in my file system inside the Pictures folder. I love this feature, in fact, is the main reason I switched to Aves, so I could easily backup and organize my photos. However, in that stupid photo picker the albums doesn't appear.

I'm not an app developer or anything, but I'm asking if someone has thought about it and has a workaround, and if that's not the case then it can be a good feature request for Aves if that's even possible to do.

Sorry if this is not in the main topic of this Q&A forum but I've already search about this topic on the internet, on Reddit and inside this discussion forum without finding a good answer to this. Thank you in advance for taking your time reading this.

[deckerst]

As far as I know, that system picker lists images and albums from the standard Media Store managed by the OS. Aves also relies on that Media Store for all the public images and videos (i.e. everything except vaults and the trash bin). So if you see images in Aves they should be publicly visible by all the other media apps. Especially for images within the Pictures folders, as it is the standard location for them.

One thing you could do is check whether you see your Aves albums in other gallery apps. Otherwise, I don't know, it may be some bug of that Android 16 picker, or there's some info I'm missing.

if that's not the case then it can be a good feature request for Aves if that's even possible to do.

I don't understand what's the feature you have in mind here.

Sorry if this is not in the main topic of this Q&A forum but I've already search about this topic on the internet, on Reddit and inside this discussion forum without finding a good answer to this.

This is the perfect place for questions like that ^^

[drHyperion451]

Thanks for replying. I will try downloading other gallery apps and see if I could see those.

I don't understand what's the feature you have in mind here.

I thought Aves didn't do it like you said before. Again, I have no idea about Android development. The feature was adding those albums into the new Photo Picker "collections".

Thanks for your reply. Please check if it's as you said in the new screen (aka. the link I've pasted in the first post) instead of any older version

After downloading other galleries: Tried InShot's Xgallery and Google Gallery (Since when Google made a gallery app standalone to Google Photos LOL??) and I could see the albums and folders correctly.
I've tried restarting the phone after that and still doesn't work. I will open a ticket to Android to see if it's a bug on the Photo Picker library.

Thank you for maintaining this app and for being so kind.

[drHyperion451]

Okay, I've found a ticket in Android that pretty much answers my question as a "fuck you"

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/264952941

It's working as intended as the Android photo picker isn't showing the list of folders on the device by design.
This may change in the feature.

So it's all very confusing, because even on Google Photos those albums/collections appear but not in a image picker library.

Either way I'm filling the ticket.

[drHyperion451]

After hours of banging my head I found the solution. You have to add Google Photos in Cloud Media Settings (three dots and settings). Then, go to the settings button and then set "Allow". It will appear those photos even if you don't have backups enabled on Google Photos.

As for a feature request, maybe Aves could be added to the "cloud media settings" as a workaround to this fix and replace Google Photos?. This would greatly improve my experience using this gallery, by far.

[deckerst]

Not sure whether a non-cloud app can request the required permission to be registered in that screen, but I'll take a look. Thanks for the suggestion.

[deckerst]

Google and OEMs are whitelisting apps that can be cloud providers so this is not an option.

While I was looking at this, I noticed that there's an additional intent (ACTION_PICK_IMAGES) that Aves is not supporting yet. Maybe by supporting it Aves will be listed as an alternative picker somewhere. I don't know where/how this intent is used.