Tint a drawable

suggest change

A drawable can be tinted a certain color. This is useful for supporting different themes within your application, and reducing the number of drawable resource files.

Using framework APIs on SDK 21+:

Drawable d = context.getDrawable(R.drawable.ic_launcher);
d.setTint(Color.WHITE);

Using android.support.v4 library on SDK 4+:

//Load the untinted resource
final Drawable drawableRes = ContextCompat.getDrawable(context, R.drawable.ic_launcher);
//Wrap it with the compatibility library so it can be altered
Drawable tintedDrawable = DrawableCompat.wrap(drawableRes);
//Apply a coloured tint
DrawableCompat.setTint(tintedDrawable, Color.WHITE);
//At this point you may use the tintedDrawable just as you usually would 
//(and drawableRes can be discarded)

//NOTE: If your original drawableRes was in use somewhere (i.e. it was the result of 
//a call to a `getBackground()` method then at this point you still need to replace 
//the background. setTint does *not* alter the instance that drawableRes points to, 
//but instead creates a new drawable instance

Please not that int color is not referring to a color Resource, however you are not limited to those colours defined in the ‘Color’ class. When you have a colour defined in your XML which you want to use you must just first get it’s value.

You can replace usages of Color.WHITE using the methods below

When targetting older API’s:

getResources().getColor(R.color.your_color);

Or on newer targets:

ContextCompat.getColor(context, R.color.your_color);

Found a mistake? Have a question or improvement idea? Let me know.

Table Of Contents