UIImageView - How to get the file name of the image assigned?

Question

Is it possible to read the name of an UIImageView's image that's presently stored in the ImageView?

I was hoping you could do something kind of like this, but haven't figured it out.

NSString *currentImageName = [MyIImageView getFileName];

Answer 1

Nope. No way to do that natively. You're going to have to subclass UIImageView, and add an imageFileName property (which you set when you set the image).

Answer 2

Nope. You can't do that.

The reason is that a UIImageView instance does not store an image file. It stores a displays a UIImage instance. When you make an image from a file, you do something like this:

UIImage *picture = [UIImage imageNamed:@"myFile.png"];

Once this is done, there is no longer any reference to the filename. The UIImage instance contains the data, regardless of where it got it. Thus, the UIImageView couldn't possibly know the filename.

Also, even if you could, you would never get filename info from a view. That breaks MVC.

Answer 3

Neither UIImageView not UIImage holds on to the filename of the image loaded.

You can either

1: (as suggested by Kenny Winker above) subclass UIImageView to have a fileName property or

2: name the image files with numbers (image1.jpg, image2.jpg etc) and tag those images with the corresponding number (tag=1 for image1.jpg, tag=2 for image2.jpg etc) or

3: Have a class level variable (eg. NSString *currentFileName) which updates whenever you update the UIImageView's image