Making a picture note system in Tasker
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how I made a virtual post-it note system in Tasker. I’ve used it quite a few times since then, but today I found myself in need of a version of it that uses pictures instead of text. So, obviously, I made one.
This creation shares similarities both with the original post-it note system and an older photo feature I added to my main todo list project. There are two ways of actually getting the photo, both resulting in an AutoNotification with the photo attached, which opens the image in the default image viewer when clicked. The notifications are persistent, so they can only be dismissed using a button on the notifications.
The first version of this uses Tasker’s own Take Photo option, and is triggered with a long press on the original note system’s sidebar icon. It uses Take Photo, and then creates a notification using the following as the path to the image (will obviously differ from device to device):
file:///storage/sdcard0/%FOTO
%FOTO is Tasker’s built in variable that contains (part of) the path to the last image taken. I wasn’t able to make it open the image based on that path using the URL field of AutoNotification, so instead I set an action for open=:=%FOTO and made a profile to receive that triggers on open=:= and uses Open File for %ancomm.
The second version uses AutoShare to allow me to create picture notes from the Share menu of the image gallery. I simply select Share, AutoShare Command, and then the Picture Note command I created. This then goes to an AutoShare profile that creates an AutoNotification with %asfile1 as the picture source. That path is in the correct format to use in AutoNotification’s URL field, so I just put it in there too to make it open on touch.
The result is two ways of creating the same notification, a persistent notification with an image than can be opened fullscreen by simply clicking the notification. A bonus is that since screenshots show up in the notification pull-down and have a Share option right there (on my ROM at least), I can quickly add screenshots as notes too if I want to.
