Is there a trick to save time building in Xcode when there are thousands of images?

Question

For testing the capabilities of an animation class I have created 5000 fullscreen images with 100kb size each. I added just 1000 of them to my project and Xcode is already building for 30 minutes now. The next time it would be nice if Xcode just uses the already alpha-premultiplied images from a previous build instead of stupidedly rebuilding everything. Any chance I can get that to work?

Answer 1

Add the build setting IPHONE_OPTIMIZE_OPTIONS=-skip-PNGs to any target that doesn't want the PNGs modified. Here's how:

Go to your projects build settings.

In the lower left hand corner is a menu you icon that looks like a GEAR

Choose Add User-Defined Setting

Name the setting: IPHONE_OPTIMIZE_OPTIONS

Set the Value to: -skip-PNGs

Do a clean build and your good to go

The idea is to do this only after you've compiled your code once. This way, the images are correctly processed once, and then you don't need XCode to do it any longer. Credits go to this site.