Yeah, this is actually a common issue on Android when picking images, especially if they’re from Google Photos or cloud apps. Sometimes the file you get is just a placeholder, not the full thing 😅

Best way is to use ContentResolver.openInputStream(uri) instead of trying to get the actual file path. It works better for those types of files and lets the system handle fetching it.

You can’t really “force” Android or Chrome to download it fully, but if you try to read from the InputStream, it usually starts the download if needed. Just gotta be patient and maybe handle failures with a try-catch. If the stream fails or is empty, the file probably isn’t ready yet.

So yeah, not perfect, but that’s what most people do. Handle errors nicely and maybe tell the user to wait a bit 👍