Choosing photo using new Google Photos app is broken

This is most certainly a workaround, but you could extract the real content URI which has apparently become embedded for some reason: content%3A%2F%2Fmedia%2Fexternal%2Fimages%2Fmedia%2F75209

I was able to create a new URI with authority=media and path=external/images/media/xxx, and content resolver returned a real URL.

Example code:

String unusablePath = contentUri.getPath();
int startIndex = unusablePath.indexOf("external/");
int endIndex = unusablePath.indexOf("/ACTUAL");
String embeddedPath = unusablePath.substring(startIndex, endIndex);

Uri.Builder builder = contentUri.buildUpon();
builder.path(embeddedPath);
builder.authority("media");
Uri newUri = builder.build();

Below code is working for me to get content URI on latest Google Photos as well. What i have tried is writing to temp file and return temp image URI, if it has authority in content URI.

You can try same:

private static String getImageUrlWithAuthority(Context context, Uri uri)
{
    InputStream is = null;

    if (uri.getAuthority() != null)
    {
        try
        {
            is = context.getContentResolver().openInputStream(uri);
            Bitmap bmp = BitmapFactory.decodeStream(is);
            return writeToTempImageAndGetPathUri(context, bmp).toString();
        }
        catch (FileNotFoundException e)
        {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
        finally
        {
            try
            {
                if (is != null)
                {
                    is.close();
                }
            }
            catch (IOException e)
            {
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
        }
    }
    return null;
}

private static Uri writeToTempImageAndGetPathUri(Context inContext, Bitmap inImage)
{
    ByteArrayOutputStream bytes = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
    inImage.compress(Bitmap.CompressFormat.JPEG, 100, bytes);
    String path = MediaStore.Images.Media.insertImage(inContext.getContentResolver(), inImage, "Title", null);
    return Uri.parse(path);
}