Chalk this up to a bug that probably will never hit anyone but me, but I thought I'd blog it on the off chance others encounter it too. This weekend I picked up the new Nexus 7 (as to why, see the end of the post) and was going through the process of setting it up like my old model.

One of the things I had on my last Nexus was three instances of the Photo Gallery widget. I use one each for my kids. I went to set this up again and ran into a problem. I added the widget. Told it I wanted to use one picture. Selected my picture from the gallery. But on the crop screen, when I tried to save the crop I got:

Unable to save cropped photo

*boggle* That was it. No details. Nothing more. Over on Google Plus John C. Bland II recommended I try the Android tools to see if I could figure out the issue. I loaded up Monitor, connected my tablet, and saw this:

11-04 15:32:32.988: W/ActivityManager(519): Permission Denial: opening provider com.android.gallery3d.provider.GalleryProvider from ProcessRecord{423d6d10 910:com.google.android.gms/u0a10021} (pid=910, uid=10021) requires com.google.android.gallery3d.permission.GALLERY_PROVIDER or com.google.android.gallery3d.permission.GALLERY_PROVIDER 

And then...

11-04 15:32:33.868: W/PlusEditorActivity(8197): Error writing file! 
11-04 15:32:33.868: W/PlusEditorActivity(8197): java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Source files specified with content URI must also specify an output URI via the "output" extra. 
(lots more crap here)

Unfortunately, I didn't really know what to make of it. But then I noticed something. The image I was using was synced from Picasa. On a whim, I made a SD Card copy of that photo (which is - as far as I can see - impossible from the Gallery - I had a copy of the image in Dropbox and I exported from there) - went back to the Photo Gallery widget and this time had no problem adding the image.

So long story - I guess be careful if you are working with Picasa images with Google widgets.

So yeah - the Nexus 7. I was initially very happy to get my first gen Nexus 7 a while ago but I made the mistake of buying the model with the smallest storage. (6 - 8 gigs or some such.) They had a promotion with the new hardware then where every purchase gave you a copy of Transformers 3 (ugh). When I downloaded the movie I ended up with about 90% of my storage gone. When I picked up Grand Theft Auto, I was in a similar bind. Plus, I experienced performance problems and stuttery scrolling that just didn't leave me happy with the hardware.

After reading good reviews on the new unit, and seeing that the 32 gig model was far cheaper than the iPad Mini, I decided to go for it. So far, I'm pretty darn happy. The display is incredible. The performance is great. This is definitely going to be my "travel" tablet going forward.