Building Camera Features with CameraX and Jetpack Compose

This article is part of the "Camera and Media Spotlight Week" series, providing resources to help enhance media experiences in applications.

The author introduces two new Compose artifacts developed by Google's engineering team: the low-level viewfinder-compose and high-level camera-compose , both now available in alpha versions. These libraries provide a more idiomatic Compose API for building camera interfaces while leveraging the powerful features of CameraX and Jetpack Compose.

The tutorial covers adding library dependencies to libs.versions.toml and build.gradle.kts , including CameraX core, compose, lifecycle, camera2, and Accompanist permissions libraries.

It then demonstrates how to grant camera permissions using the Accompanist Permissions library, with code for setting up AndroidManifest.xml and implementing a permission request flow in the composable.

The article explains creating a CameraPreviewViewModel that manages the CameraX Preview use case, handles surface requests, and binds the camera to the lifecycle owner. The ViewModel uses ProcessCameraProvider to initialize and manage camera resources.

Finally, it shows how to implement the CameraPreviewContent composable that collects surface requests from the ViewModel and passes them to the CameraXViewfinder component from the camera-compose library.

By following this tutorial, developers can build a fully functional full-screen camera viewfinder with seamless Compose integration, supporting adaptive APIs and animation features.