Animation list to reference external files

Hello all
I have a situation where I can’t seem to figure out an effective way to solve it. I created over XML with animation list to be loaded by animation drawable. In these Xml animation lists, as you may know, they reference drawables in their items which are images located in the drawable folder.

For a reason beyond the scope of the question, we had to move images to external device storage (not part of drawable folder anymore)
Is there a way where I can reference these external files in the XML? If not what would you do?
I know animation drawable can be created in code and I can call addFrame with drawable built from a path. But to remove all these Xmls, and type all the file paths programmaticilly is a very time consuming process. I was hoping there is another way

Thank you so much