Cloudinary, Android and Parse - Photo Album sample

Demo for writing an Android application using Parse as a backend and Cloudinary as image backend for storing, applying transformations and serving of images.

For more details about Cloudinary: http://cloudinary.com/

For more details about Android development: http://developer.android.com/develop/index.html

For more details about Parse: https://www.parse.com/

Setup and run the sample project

• Setup the Parse backend in 7 simple steps
• Setup a working eclipse with android SDK and ADT environment.
• Clone or download this repository into your eclipse workspace
• Copy the AndroidManifest.xml.sample file into AndroidManifest.xml and modify the meta-data fields within it to reflect your Cloudinary cloud name and your Parse Application ID and Client Key.
• Import your project (File -> Import -> General -> Existing Project into Workspace -> Select root directory -> Browse -> [Choose the cloudinary-android-parse-sample path])
• Run the application on an Android device or a simulator (Run -> Run As -> Android Application -> [Choose device to run on])

How does it work

The application is composed of 5 android activities (SplashScreenActivity, LoginActivity, ListPhotoActivity, ShowPhotoActivity and UploadPhotoActivity), the application singleton (PhotoAlbumApplication), a few helper classes and a few external libraries.

Upload process

The Cloudinary API key and API secret are protected in Parse cloud code. They are not bundled in the application and are not accessible by any user - making the design more secure and protecting yours and your users' privacy and data integrity.

In order to upload in image from the application:

• A request to upload is sent by the application to Parse backend using a cloud function.
• The cloud function (by default, sign_upload_request) creates a signed request (using Cloudinary API parameters) and returns it to the application.
• The application uploads the image to Cloudinary using the retrieved signed request. When the upload is complete, Cloudinary returns a signed result of the operation containing the image public_id, other identifiers required to access the image and metadata about the image (disk size, dimensions, etc...)
• The application saves the signed reference of the image to Parse backend.
• The Parse beforeSave filter verifies the authenticity of the saved reference and aborts the process if it's invalid.

PhotoAlbumApplication.java

Contains initializations of Universal Image Loader (UIL), Parse and Cloudinary. Cloudinary is initialized using the CLOUDINARY_URL meta-data entry in AndroidManifest.xml by passing the Context to the Cloudinary constructor

Activities

SplashScreenActivity.java

Displays a splash-screen and then launches the LoginActivity

LoginActivity.java

Displays a login screen. The Chuck Norris image demonstrates the usage of Cloudinary Facebook profile image retrieval (See DownloadImageTask.java for more information about the image download code) After the user has provided a username and a password, invokes a task which tries to register (if username doesn't exist yet) or login on behalf of the user using Parse.

ListPhotoActivity.java

Displays an endless list of uploaded images. The list is fetched from Parse by querying the PARSE_MODEL. The images themselves are retrieved from Cloudinary. When an image is clicked, the ShowPhotoActivity is launched passing it the image identifier in the intent extra parameters.
This activity also has a menu with upload, refresh and logout actions.

Based partially on ImageGridActivity.java from Universal Image Loader

ShowPhotoActivity.java

Displays a slidable pager with different transformations of the selected photo.

Based on Android Blank Activity with Scrollable Tabs + Swipe template

UploadPhotoActivity.java

Sends an image selection intent to allow the user to select an image to upload. Once the user selects an image, the upload process begins.

Helper classes

Constants.java

Contains several configuration parameters.

DownloadImageTask.java

A simple but useful AsyncTask which fetches an image by given URL into a given ImageView in the background

L.java

Logging helper class

Libraries

cloudinaryandroid-1.0.1-parse.jar

The Cloudinary library used to upload and retrieve Cloudinary images

Parse-1.3.1.jar

The Parse library used for user management (sign-up, login), and image objects management (add, list, fetch)

universal-image-loader-1.8.5

A very comprehensive and flexible library for "asynchronous image loading, caching and displaying"

Read more

Cloudinary documentation
Cloudinary for Android
Cloudinary for Parse

Support

You can open an issue through GitHub.

Contact us at info@cloudinary.com

Or via Twitter: @cloudinary

Licenses

• This project is released under the MIT license.
• Parse third-party licenses
• Android-Universal-Image-Loader is distributed under the Apache License Version 2.0