Is it possible to tile images in a UIScrollView without having to manually create all the tiles?

Question

In the iPhone sample code "PhotoScroller" from WWDC 2010, they show how to do a pretty good mimmic of the Photos app with scrolling, zooming, and paging of images. They also tile the images to show how to display high resolution images and maintain good performance.

Tiling is implemented in the sample code by grabbing pre scaled and cut images for different resolutions and placing them in the grid which makes up the entire image.

My question is: is there a way to tile images without having to manually go through all your photos and create "tiles"? How is it the Photos app is able to display large images on the fly?

Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

I've found this which may be of help: http://www.mikelin.ca/blog/2010/06/iphone-splitting-image-into-tiles-for-faster-loading-with-imagemagick/

You just run it in the Terminal as a shell script on your Mac.

Answer 2

Sorry Jonah, but I think that you cannot do what you want to.

I have been implementing a comic app using the same example as a reference and had the same doubt. Finally, I realized that, even if you could load the image and cut it into tiles the first time that you use it, you shouldn't. There are two reasons for that:

1. You do the tiling to save time and be more responsive. Loading and tiling takes time for a large image.
2. Previous reason is particularly important the first time the user runs the app.

If these two reasons make no sense to you, and you still want to do it, I would use Quartz to create the tiles. CGImage function CGImageCreateWithImageInRect would be my starting point.

Answer 3

Many image formats support region-based decoding. Instead of loading the whole image into memory, decompressing the whole thing, and discarding all but the region of interest (ROI), you can load and decode only the ROI, on-demand. For the most part, this eliminates the need to pre-generate and save image tiles. I've never worked with ImageMagick but I'd be amazed if it couldn't do it. (I have done it using the Java Advanced Imaging (JAI) API, which isn't going to help you on the iPhone...)

I've played with the PhotoScroller example and the way it works with pre-generated tiles is only to demonstrate the idea behind CATiledLayer, and make a working-self contained project. It's straightforward to replace the image tile loading strategy - just rewrite the TilingView tileForScale:row:col: method to return a UIImage tile from some other source, be it Quartz or ImageMagick or whatever.