How to Build a Photo Editing App in 10 minutes using Flutter and IMG.LY

Hello everyone, in today's article, you will learn how to build a photo editing app using Flutter and Img.ly.

But, before I dive into the technical side of this tutorial, I will like to give a brief explanation about IMG.LY.

What is Img.ly?

IMG.LY is a German-based company that offers cutting-edge image and video processing solutions with their Photo and Video editing SDK.

The PhotoEditorSDK is mainly used for photo editing purposes and the SDK is easy to implement on a mobile application.

So let’s get started

Create a new flutter project with Visual Studio, IntelliJ, or Android studio.

After successfully creating a new flutter project, Open “pubspec.yaml”, and install photo_editor_sdk and image_picker plugins.

dependencies:
  photo_editor_sdk: ^2.0.0
  image_picker: ^0.8.1+3

Note:image_picker this plugin will be used to get photos from the device while photo_editor_sdk will be used for photo editing.

Configure PhotoEditor SDK for Android

PhotoEditor SDK for Android is quite large, because of that you will need to enable Multidex for your project as follows:

1. Add the img.ly repository and plugin by opening the android/build.gradle file (not android/app/build.gradle) and add these lines at the top:

buildscript {
    repositories {
        google()
        jcenter()
        maven { url "https://artifactory.img.ly/artifactory/imgly" }
    }
    dependencies {
        classpath 'com.android.tools.build:gradle:4.1.0'
        classpath "org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-gradle-plugin:$kotlin_version"
        classpath 'ly.img.android.sdk:plugin:8.3.1'
    }
}

Please note: In order to update PhotoEditor SDK for Android replace the version string 8.3.1 with a newer release.

2. Open the android/app/build.gradle file (not android/build.gradle) and add these lines at the end:

android {
  defaultConfig {
      applicationId "com.example.photo_editor"
      minSdkVersion 16
      targetSdkVersion…