Getting Image from URL Objective C

Question

I'm trying to get an image from an URL and it doesn't seem to be working for me. Can someone point me in the right direction?

Here is my code:

NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://myurl/mypic.jpg"];

NSString *newIMAGE = [[NSString alloc] initWithContentsOfURL:url
                                       encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding error:nil];

cell.image = [UIImage imageNamed:newIMAGE];

When I debug the newIMAGE string is nil so something isn't working there.

Answer 1

Ok there's a couple of things wrong here:

1. The conversion from URL (url) to NSString (newImage) is incorrect, what the code actually does there is try to load the contents of "http://myurl/mypic.jpg" into the NSString.

2. The -imageNamed method takes a string that is a path of a local file, not a URL as an argument.

You need to use an NSData object as an intermediary, like in this example: http://blogs.oreilly.com/digitalmedia/2008/02/creating-an-uiimage-from-a-url.html

Answer 2

What you want is to get the image data, then initialize a UIImage using that data:

NSData * imageData = [[NSData alloc] initWithContentsOfURL: [NSURL URLWithString: @"http://myurl/mypic.jpg"]];
cell.image = [UIImage imageWithData: imageData];
[imageData release];