Avoid animation of UICollectionView after reloadItemsAtIndexPaths

UICollectionView animate items after reloadItemsAtIndexPaths is called (fade animation).

Is there a way to avoid this animation?

iOS 6

It's worth noting that if you're targeting iOS 7 and above, you can use the new UIView method performWithoutAnimation:. I suspect that under the hood this is doing much the same as the other answers here (temporarily disabling UIView animations / Core Animation actions), but the syntax is nice and clean.

So for this question in particular...

Objective-C:

[UIView performWithoutAnimation:^{
    [self.collectionView reloadItemsAtIndexPaths:indexPaths];
}];

Swift:

UIView.performWithoutAnimation {
    self.collectionView.reloadItemsAtIndexPaths(indexPaths)
}

Of course this principle can be applied for any situation that you want to ensure a change is not animated.

You could also try this:

UICollectionView *collectionView;

...

[UIView setAnimationsEnabled:NO];

[collectionView performBatchUpdates:^{
    [collectionView reloadItemsAtIndexPaths:indexPaths];
} completion:^(BOOL finished) {
    [UIView setAnimationsEnabled:YES];
}];

Edit:

I have also found that if you wrap performBatchUpdates in a UIView animation block, the UIView animation is used instead of the default animation, so you can just set the animation duration to 0, like so:

[UIView animateWithDuration:0 animations:^{
    [collectionView performBatchUpdates:^{
        [collectionView reloadItemsAtIndexPaths:indexPaths];
    } completion:nil];
}];

This is extra cool if you want to use iOS 7 springy animations during inserts and deletes!