iPhone: Custom UIImagePickerController?

Question

It seems like the built in UIImagePickerController cannot accept sources other than its device camera Roll.

I would like to get the functionality of picking and enlarging pictures within my own app. Also I would like to allow the user to select the pictures and save it into their camera roll (so they can later use it as wall paper)

1) what is the recommended way of building a custom UIImagePickerController that supports what I need ? Is there another built in controller I am missing?

3) Is there a way to take a UIImage and save it to the desktop background of the device directly? Or is it a two step (first save to camera roll), then have the user load the picture from there to save as wallpaper

Thanks in advance!!

Answer 1

Regarding #3) there is no public call in the SDK to save an UIImage to the desktop.

I don't know about the rest of your questions though.

Answer 2

At this point, it seems that the only way to build a custom UIImagePickerController functionality is to subclass, and then muck with the view hierarchy directly. This allows you to move, hide, and replace UI elements and access the non-public classes that control the operation of the camera, but as you probably gather, this technique is both unsupported (in that it may, and probably will, break with future updates) and not recommended (in that it may, and probably will, get your app rejected from the App Store if detected).

As far as your second point (somehow numbered 3), John is right: there is no call in the public SDK to accomplish this. You could probably hack something together if you're clever, but remember the warnings in my first paragraph...

Answer 3

Just today I started a open source UIImagePickerController clone, it is not perfect but it works quite ok. Feel free to fork http://github.com/jeena/JPImagePickerController