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Option to hide albums in Phimpme Android Application

In Phimpme Android Application, users can perform various operations on the albums available such as move, creating a .zip file for the album, delete the album, exclude an album, rename an album, pin an album to the top and more. However one another important functionality that has been added in the application is the option to hide  album/albums. So in this post I will be discussing how we achieved the functionality to hide albums in Phimpme Android Application.

Step 1

First we need to get the albums which are selected to be hidden. This can be done by storing the selected items in an Arraylist<Album> which will keep track of the users choice to hide albums. This can be achieved with the following lines of code.

private int toggleSelectAlbum(int index) {
if (dispAlbums.get(index) != null) {
  dispAlbums.get(index).setSelected(!dispAlbums.get(index).isSelected());
  if (dispAlbums.get(index).isSelected()) selectedAlbums.add(dispAlbums.get(index));
  else selectedAlbums.remove(dispAlbums.get(index));
}
return index;
}

Step 2

After storing of the albums to be hidden a function hideSelectedAlbums() is called with Context being passed as the parameter. Now inside this function we retrieve the albums looping through the Arraylist that stores the albums to be hidden and call another function hideAlbum() passing in the album and context as the parameters. The code snippet representing the above operation is given below.

public void hideSelectedAlbums(Context context) {
for (Album selectedAlbum : selectedAlbums)
  hideAlbum(selectedAlbum, context);
clearSelectedAlbums();
}

Step 3.

Now a .nomedia file is added to the directories/albums which are to be hidden and the android Media Scanner System service is triggered thereafter. As a result of the presence of the .nomedia file inside the directory the Media Scanner service won’t scan the particular directory/album thereby the album will not be picked up at the time of displaying the albums. The code snippet to perform the mentioned operation is provided below.

File dirName = new File(path);
File file = new File(dirName, “.nomedia”);
if (!file.exists()) {
try {
  FileOutputStream out = new FileOutputStream(file);
  out.flush();
  out.close();
  scanFile(context, new String[]{ file.getAbsolutePath() });
} catch (Exception e) {
  e.printStackTrace();
}
}

The screenshot for the display of hidden folders is provided below.

This is how we have achieved the functionality of hiding albums in the Phimpme Android application. To get the full source code, please refer to the Phimpme Android GitHub repository listed in the resources section below.

Resources

  1. Android Developer Guide – https://developer.android.com/reference/android/media/MediaScannerConnection.html
  2. Github-Phimpme Android Repository –https://github.com/fossasia/phimpme-android/
  3. Hiding directories using .nomedia file – http://www.easycodeway.com/2016/08/hide-files-in-android-using-nomedia-file.html

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