How to get photo previews from android gallery?

Question

Android

I work in Unity3d for Android. You need to show the user a gallery of his photos. There is a plugin that returns paths to gallery photos (eg external/dcim/camera001.jpg, ...). Downloading and decoding a photo at this address takes a lot of time (from 0.2 to 1 sec on different phones). photos are large (5-15 megapixels) - i.e. the entire gallery takes a very long time to load (a screen of 20 previews takes almost 15 seconds to load, while loading the processor almost completely).
However, on newer androids, built-in galleries load instantly. This means that photos are loaded from small preview files. How to get the path to these previews?

Answer 1

this is not new, I
have a thumb folder on 2.3.x... there are thumbnails of photos.