CameraX in Android

2 min readFeb 21, 2022

The camera is one of the most much-used components of a mobile devices. It is responsible for capturing optical images of the surrounding environment. If you want to take photos in your app, you have two options which are

Invoking an implicit intent Intent(MediaStore.ACTION_IMAGE_CAPTURE) that redirects to the users device camera.
Using a Camera API to capture images.

In this article will be about option 2. I’ll talk about CameraX and how to implement it to your projects.

What is the CameraX ?

CameraX is a Jetpack support library that allows developers to easily control a device’s camera.

How to implement CameraX to projects ?

I’ll show you how to implement it step by step.

Heads of steps we’ll follow ;

Implementation
Setting layout
Image Capture and Storage
Switch the camera

Dependencies and Permissions

Add the following dependencies in the build.gradle(app) file. Cause we’ll use ViewBinding, we need to set viewBinding true in buildFeatures .

We also need to declare the following permissions in the AndroidManifest.xml file, above the <application> tag:

<uses-feature android:name="android.hardware.camera.any"/>
<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.CAMERA"/>

Camera Preview

Let’s start bu setting layout file named activity_main.xml. It includes three component which are ;

Preview → To display the camera.

Two AppCompatButton→ One for taking pictures and the other for changing the camera direction.

activity_main.xml looks like the following

And binds our views in MainActivity.kt

After that, add these attributes

private lateinit var cameraProviderFuture:ListenableFuture<ProcessCameraProvider>private lateinit var cameraSelector:CameraSelector

cameraProviderFuture → is used to bind the lifecycle of the camera to the lifecycle of the application.

cameraSelector → allows us to control camera direction (front or back).

Initialize these in onCreate() method

cameraProviderFuture = ProcessCameraProvider.getInstance(this)
cameraSelector = CameraSelector.DEFAULT_BACK_CAMERA

The codes that will activate the camera will be included in the startCamera() function.

Call this function from onCreate()

override fun onCreate(savedInstanceState: Bundle?) {
    ...
    startCamera()
    ...
}

Now the camera’s ready to go, but something’s missing. It’s permission , user permission is required to use the camera. And we can handle it by adding this above onCreate() .

We need to launch cameraProviderResult in onCreate()

cameraProviderResult.launch(android.Manifest.permission.CAMERA)

Taking Photo

First, create the following attributes that allow us to capture images

private var imageCapture: ImageCapture? = null
private lateinit var imgCaptureExecutor: ExecutorService

Instantiate imgCaptureExecutor in onCreate()

imgCaptureExecutor = Executors.newSingleThreadExecutor()

Instantiate imageCapture cameraProviderFuture.addListener({ … }) in startCamera()

This is the final look of startCamera() method.

Create an function names takePhoto()

Switch Camera

In conclusion, setting switchCameraBtn like the following.

In this article, I briefly talked about CameraX and showed you how to use it in your project. I hope it helps.You can clap this article , if you like it and can stay tuned for articles like this.