Take a picture and get bytes without saving on disk

Question

Is it possible to take a picture and get the image as byte array without saving it?

All I want is, take an in memory picture. I don't want to save it. Also i plan to use other camera activity to take the picture (i mean, i don't want to implement my own camera logic)

Please note, I know that I can take a picture, read bytes and delete it. But I am looking if I can avoid this saving and deleting part, instead directly get the image in an in memory byte array.

Answer 1

Is it possible to take a picture and get the image as byte array without saving it?

That is the behavior of the android.hardware.Camera API, the android.hardware.camera2 API, and third-party libraries that simplify those APIs (e.g., Fotoapparat, CameraKit-Android).

i plan to use other camera activity to take the picture

If by "other camera activity", you mean a third-party camera app (e.g., via ACTION_IMAGE_CAPTURE), that will be difficult and unreliable. At best, you could try to use a content Uri pointing to a ContentProvider that you write that only holds onto written streams in memory. I would expect you to run out of heap space. Plus, not all camera apps will support a content Uri for EXTRA_OUTPUT (though they should).