I'm using Xamarin Forms for a photo capture app and using James' Media Plugin PCL to capture photo using the device camera.
I realize that, for every photo, it creates a file in
/storage/emulated/0/Android/data/com.myapp/files/Pictures
(and I can provide a subdirectory within Pictures folder and the name of the file). What I want to do is delete all these files the next time my app starts up.
Since I'm only focused on the Android version, I've set up a dependency service call to locally delete the file (which I thought was trivial) but for some reasons I simply can NOT find that file programmatically or through ADB shell.
When I plug my device in for USB file transfer on windows computer, I can see the photos I want to delete in
Computer\Moto G (4)\Internal shared storage\Android\data\com.myapp\files\Pictures
But I can't get to these files through code or shell. In code, I'm getting the path through
Forms.Context.GetExternalFilesDir(Android.OS.Environment.DirectoryPictures).AbsolutePath
which gives me the path
/storage/emulated/0/Android/data/com.myapp/files/Pictures
which I think is the path where my files SHOULD be. But it's come up blank. Whether I try System.IO or Java.IO, the directory comes up empty and file.delete() or System.IO.File.Delete(path) doesn't work for me.
tldr; What does
Computer\Moto G (4)\Internal shared storage\Android\data\com.myapp\files\Pictures
translate to in terms of actual physical path in Android OS which we can list from ADB Shell?
It was a false negative. I was looking at the files through Windows Explorer and for some reason, Windows kept showing me those files even after they were deleted. Obviously, the reason I couldn't se those files through ADB Shell or from within Android File Manager was because those files were never there.
Forms.Context.GetExternalFilesDir(Android.OS.Environment.DirectoryPictures).AbsolutePath
gives me
/storage/emulated/0/Android/data/com.myapp/files/Pictures
which is the same as
Computer\Moto G (4)\Internal shared storage\Android\data\com.myapp\files\Pictures
Both System.IO.File.Delete(path) and new Java.IO.File(dir, children[i]).Delete(); methods work fine. It's just that windows chooses to keep showing the empty "ghost" files.
This issue has apparently been raised before to no answer: Programatically deleted files still show up in Windows Explorer