Getting photos onto Android virtual device in IntelliJ IDEA

I'm working on an app to enable people to upload photos from their phone, and I need to be able to test this functionality out in the AVD via emulator. However the AVDs don't seem to have any photos in storage so I can't use them for testing.

Is there an efficient way to get photos onto the virtual device and preferably keep them there so I can run multiple tests on them? I know I can debug on my phone as well (and have been doing that), however I would prefer to do most of my debugging on the emulator if possible.

I'm using the IntelliJ IDEA for development.