Lightweight Android Gallery replacement to quickly select a picture for upload, without taking much memory

Question

Scenario:

1. On Android, I am on facebook.com or similar website
2. I want to post a picture I took recently, so on the website I click the file upload button
3. Android's gallery loads painfully
4. I choose the picture, and the gallery closes
5. Meanwhile, the browser has been kicked out of memory, so I have to retry the whole procedure again.

I believe that Android's default gallery is at fault here, because it takes a lot of memory, buffers hundreds of pictures at a time, and insists on first showing me all an "Albums" frontpage which includes useless collections, for instance all of my Blogger albums and Google Profile Photos.

So, I am looking for a ultralight picture chooser:

• Takes nearly no memory
• Shows the ~20 last pictures, with paging allowing to reach earlier pictures
• Always shows the same directory (either configurable in settings, or remember the last with lightweight folder navigation)
• Loads in a short time, even if the folder actually contains tens of thousands of pictures.
• Shows thumbnails (not cropped), caching thumbnails is OK
• Free

Ideally open source.

Answer 1

Technical speaking you need an android app that supports

• "ACTION_PICK" and/or "ACTION_GET_CONTENT"
• for mimeType="image/*"
• and scheme="file" or scheme="content"
• "picture I took recently" means "sorted by photo-dated descending"

There are some opensource gallery apps under active development on github and available in fdroid store:

• https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools/Simple-Gallery/ (implements "ACTION_PICK" and "ACTION_GET_CONTENT")
• https://github.com/HoraApps/LeafPic (in may 2016 "ACTION_PICK" and/or "ACTION_GET_CONTENT" was not implemented, but this may have changed in the meantime)
• https://github.com/k3b/APhotoManager: "ACTION_PICK" and/or "ACTION_GET_CONTENT" is implemented but not released yet.

APhotoManager is an open source android gallery replacement for local photos where i am the author of.

it already supports

• filters (only from certain folders or not older than xx days or ....)
• sorting
• huge image collections (I have > 16000 on my tablet)
• gui language translated into en, jp, de, fr, it