Pick Images, Videos, PDFs, and More in .NET MAUI using FilePicker

2 min readNov 5, 2022

In this article, you’ll learn how to implement FilePicker in your .NET MAUI application.

The FilePicker class lets a user pick a single or multiple files from the device.

If you worked with Xamarin, this is the same FilePicker that has been implemented in Xamarin.Essentials library. In .NET MAUI, it’s now built-in and comes with IFilePicker interface so you can implement it through dependency injection if you want to.

Getting Started

To get started, you don’t need any extra setup except on Android, you must add ReadExternalStorage permission and you’re all set.

Open the Platforms/Android/AndroidManifest.xml file and add the following:

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE" />

Pick a file

Use PickAsync method to prompt the user to pick a file from the device:

FileResult result = await FilePicker.PickAsync();

You can get the name and full path of the selected file from the result:

var fileName = result.FileName;
var fullPath = result.FullPath;

File Types

Default file types are PDFs, videos, images, or specific to PNGs or JPEGs. You can specify file types allowed by using the PickOptions parameter. Set it through FileTypes property:

FileResult result = await FilePicker.PickAsync(new PickOptions
{
    FileTypes = FilePickerFileType.Images
});

Custom File Types

You can also specify custom file types per platform, by creating an instance of the FilePickerFileType class.

In this example, here’s how you would specify a .doc or .docx file type:

File types may be different from one platform to the other. Android file types usually refer to as MIME types, while iOS as UTType values and WinUI as file extensions.

Here’s a demo of how it works on Windows and Android:

Pick multiple files

To pick multiple files, use FilePicker.PickMultipleAsync method and IEnumerable<FileResult> type is returned with all of the selected files.

Read a File

The FullPath property doesn't always return the physical path to the file.

To get the file, use the OpenReadAsync method.

For example, here’s how you would set an image source from the FileResult:

FileResult result = await FilePicker.PickAsync(new PickOptions
{
    FileTypes = FilePickerFileType.Images
});

if (result != null)
{
    var stream = await result.OpenReadAsync();
    MyImage.Source = ImageSource.FromStream(() => stream);
}

You can also implement FilePicker with dependency injection by using the IFilePicker interface and resolving it to FilePicker.Defaultin your MauiProgram.cs like:

builder.Services.AddSingleton(typeof(IFilePicker), FilePicker.Default);

Well, that’s it on how you can implement FilePicker in your .NET MAUI application!

All the sample code can be found on my GitHub page, here: https://github.com/cedricgabrang/FilePickerMauiDemo

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Cheers!