SDWebImage

Like the most successful apps, the most successful libraries tackle one task that is both common and painful, and make it simple and frictionless.

One task that I am sure all of you have done at least once is downloading an image from a server and display it using an UIImageView.

Despite sounding like a simple thing, there are a lot of moving parts involved, and it is not a simple to implement.

Today’s library is SDWebImage by Olivier Poitrey, and makes downloading images and setting the in UIImageViews a oneliner.

UIImageView and SDWebImage

cell.imageView.sd_setImageWithURL(url)

That’s really all you need 😎

If you want more control, say a placeholder and a completion closure for example, SDWebImage has got you covered.

let placeholder = ...
cell.imageView.sd_setImageWithURL(url, placeholderImage: placeholder) { image, error, cacheType, url in
    // do stuff
}

As you can imagine the this functionality is implemented via a category on UIImageView. Category?! Yes, SDWebImage is written in Objective-C, but is so cool that I decided to include it anyway.

What sd_setImageWithURL is doing under the hood is calling SDWebImageManager.sharedManager().downloadImageWithURL for you.

If you have some particular needs you can do that yourself, for example if you wanted to reveal the image using a fade in effect.

Setting images using a fade in effect with SDWebImage

imageView.alpha = 0
SDWebImageManager.sharedManager().downloadImageWithURL(url, options: [], progress: nil) { downloadedImage, error, cacheType, isDownloaded, url in
        imageView.image = downloadedImage

        UIView.animateWithDuration(1) {
            cell.imageView.alpha = 1
        }
}

Very straightforward.

Cancelling downloads

Whenever dealing network related operation it is important to be a good iOS citizen, and respect our users trying to consume as little of their data as possible.

One important thing you will want to take care of is cancelling image downloads that are not needed anymore. Don’t worry, it won’t take you long:

imageView.sd_cancelCurrentImageLoad()

SDWebImageManager.sharedManager().cancelAll()

Next Steps

As you know the tutorials in The iOS Advent Calendar don’t aim to me comprehensive, but rather show you just enough code to give you a feel for the library.

If you think SDWebImage could help you in your projects, checkout the project repository on GitHub. This library is widely famous and used, and as such has a big community around it. There is even a Stack Overflow tag.

Finally, if you’d like to have some code ready to play with, have a look at the full code from this tutorial.

That’s it for today. See you tomorrow with a library that will sweeten your Core Data experience. Subscribe to the email list to avoid missing out.

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