OneCamera

Take photos straight into the right folder.

Features • Capture & storage • Responsiveness • Tech stack • Build

OneCamera is an Android app for taking photos directly into the folder you choose. Pick a folder, tap the camera button, and a camera app takes the shot. The captured photo is saved straight into the selected folder.

Features

• Folder-first shooting — choose a folder before taking a photo.
• Camera handoff — fires MediaStore.ACTION_IMAGE_CAPTURE; the system resolves it to the default camera app (no camera picker inside OneCamera).
• No broad storage permissions — only a user-selected SAF root folder; everything else is off-limits to the app.
• Folder management — create, rename, move, and delete folders in the SAF tree.
• ZIP archives — one-tap pack a folder as original files or as JPG quality 85, then share via any app.
• Gallery — adaptive grid/list view, sort by name, fullscreen viewer with zoom and subsampling of huge photos, multi-select, share via system intents.
• Draggable floating camera button with position persisted across restarts.
• Material 3 UI with dynamic color, light, dark, and system themes.
• No tracking, no ads, fully open source.

Capture & Storage

OneCamera never asks for broad storage access. All file work goes through a single user-picked Storage Access Framework tree.

Capture flow:

1. The user grants a folder tree through the system picker; the grant is persisted.
2. The app creates a temp file exposed through FileProvider and fires ACTION_IMAGE_CAPTURE with EXTRA_OUTPUT; the system routes the intent to the default camera app.
3. The camera app writes the shot into the temp file; the app moves it into the selected SAF folder.
4. A photo event bus refreshes the gallery without a restart; thumbnails are decoded subsampled and cached on disk.

Folder operations — rename, delete, move — go through SAF documents, so the UI and the file system always agree. ZIP packaging runs off the main thread with progress; if a file cannot be read, the partial archive is deleted and the outcome carries an error message. Archive entry names are UTF-8 encoded to preserve non-ASCII names. Revoking tree access is handled explicitly instead of crashing.

Responsiveness

Photo libraries can be large, so heavy work stays off the main thread:

• SAF queries, folder scanning, and ZIP packaging run on background dispatchers;
• gallery content loads incrementally, and folder statistics are computed separately from the photo list;
• thumbnails load through Coil with a bounded memory cache and a disk cache capped by LRU eviction, and oversized photos are subsampled in the fullscreen viewer;
• grid and list are lazy; sort order and view mode changes reuse loaded state instead of rescanning the tree;
• rotation recreates the Activity by design — scroll position, sort order, and the FAB position live in ViewModel state and DataStore, not in composables;
• Baseline Profile rules ship in the APK to speed up cold start.

Tech Stack

• Kotlin 2.4.21
• Jetpack Compose (BOM 2026.09.00), Material 3
• Hilt 2.60.1 (dependency injection)
• Navigation Compose 2.10.2
• DataStore Preferences 1.2.1
• Coil 3.6.3 + ZoomImage 1.7.0 (image loading and fullscreen zoom)
• kotlinx.serialization 1.11.0
• Androidx tracing with a committed Baseline Profile
• Android Gradle Plugin 9.4.1, Gradle 9.8.1, JDK 21

Build

./gradlew :app:assembleRelease

The release APK targets arm64-v8a.

License

MIT