Fun with Text to Image in Android

Have you display any Image in your App? Of course you have! How have you done it?… Let me guess…

1. Have an image asset (either PNG, JPEG, WEBP or VectorDrawable) in your resource folder.
2. Load the image from an image URL
3. Payload sent an Image URL that contains image URL, and you load the image.

What if I say, let’s load it from TEXT is the other option? What!?

Yes, that’s possible!

Base64 format

There’s a format call Base64 format that could represent any Binary data in Text. This includes any image file (JPEG, PNG, WEBP, BMP, you name it).

To decode

Assuming you have a Base64 Text representation of an image, to decode it back just use Base64.decode as below. And for my case, I’ll translate into Bitmap using BitmapFactory.decodeByteArray.

Note: the BitmapFactory.decodeByteArray could decode BMP, PNG, JPEG etc, any image format that is listed in https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/media/media-formats#core

fun String.decodeBase64IntoBitmap(): Bitmap {
    val imageBytes = Base64.decode(this, Base64.DEFAULT)
    return BitmapFactory.decodeByteArray(
         imageBytes, 0, imageBytes.size)
}