I'm not very comfortable working with the Java documentation on the web, so I haven't gotten far with using the FileSystemView class.

In trying to explore the use of the File class, I did the following:

import javax.swing.filechooser.FileSystemView;

void setup(){
 size(100,100);
 
 print( File.listRoots() );
 println( File.listRoots() );
}

Which outputs:
first line: [Ljava.io.File;@c1ea29second line: [0] /
(note: I'm not sure why the line doesn't break in the post)

I think the first is an object reference of some kind. If anyone has any pointers of how to use these classes to drive around the computer and get paths to files, I would appreciate it.

I am hoping to be able to have processing look in a directory and load all the images found therein. Currently, I am using sequentially-named images and using a for-loop to construct the sequence of filenames to load in using loadImage. I would like to bypass the need to sequence my images.

Thank you for the helpful response. I encountered some weirdness with the mac platform, which doesn't seem to allow me to enter absolute paths in java. Instead, all filepaths are relative to the Processing application directory.

Here is some code that works on mac osx (just collages the images in the folder):

import java.io.File;

PImage[] images;

void setup(){
 size(1024, 768);
 //note: the directory structure is relative to the processing application folder on a mac
 File dir = new File("../../Users/oxford/Documents/someImages");
 
 File[] files = dir.listFiles();
 images = new PImage[files.length];
 
 int numImages = 0;
 for( int i=0; i < files.length; i++ ){
   String path = files[i].getAbsolutePath();
   if( path.toLowerCase().endsWith(".jpg") || path.toLowerCase().endsWith(".png") ){
     images[i] = loadImage( path );
     numImages++;
   }
 }
 images = (PImage[])subset( images, 0, numImages );
 
 for( int i=0; i < images.length; i++ ){
   image( images[i], random( -images[i].width/2, width - images[i].width/2), random( -images[i].height/2, height - images[i].height/2));
 }
 
}