How to easily resize/optimize an image size with iOS?

My application is downloading a set of image files from the network, and saving them to the local iPhone disk. Some of those images are pretty big in size (widths larger than 500 pixels, for instance). Since the iPhone doesn't even have a big enough display to show the image in its original size, I'm planning on resizing the image to something a bit smaller to save on space/performance.

Also, some of those images are JPEGs and they are not saved as the usual 60% quality setting.

How can I resize a picture with the iPhone SDK, and how can I change the quality setting of a JPEG image?

Solution 1:

A couple of suggestions are provided as answers to this question. I had suggested the technique described in this post, with the relevant code:

+ (UIImage*)imageWithImage:(UIImage*)image 
               scaledToSize:(CGSize)newSize;
{
   UIGraphicsBeginImageContext( newSize );
   [image drawInRect:CGRectMake(0,0,newSize.width,newSize.height)];
   UIImage* newImage = UIGraphicsGetImageFromCurrentImageContext();
   UIGraphicsEndImageContext();

   return newImage;
}

As far as storage of the image, the fastest image format to use with the iPhone is PNG, because it has optimizations for that format. However, if you want to store these images as JPEGs, you can take your UIImage and do the following:

NSData *dataForJPEGFile = UIImageJPEGRepresentation(theImage, 0.6);

This creates an NSData instance containing the raw bytes for a JPEG image at a 60% quality setting. The contents of that NSData instance can then be written to disk or cached in memory.

Solution 2:

The easiest and most straightforward way to resize your images would be this

float actualHeight = image.size.height;
float actualWidth = image.size.width;
float imgRatio = actualWidth/actualHeight;
float maxRatio = 320.0/480.0;

if(imgRatio!=maxRatio){
    if(imgRatio < maxRatio){
        imgRatio = 480.0 / actualHeight;
        actualWidth = imgRatio * actualWidth;
        actualHeight = 480.0;
    }
    else{
        imgRatio = 320.0 / actualWidth;
        actualHeight = imgRatio * actualHeight;
        actualWidth = 320.0;
    }
}
CGRect rect = CGRectMake(0.0, 0.0, actualWidth, actualHeight);
UIGraphicsBeginImageContext(rect.size);
[image drawInRect:rect];
UIImage *img = UIGraphicsGetImageFromCurrentImageContext();
UIGraphicsEndImageContext();

Solution 3:

The above methods work well for small images, but when you try to resize a very large image, you will quickly run out of memory and crash the app. A much better way is to use CGImageSourceCreateThumbnailAtIndexto resize the image without completely decoding it first.

If you have the path to the image you want to resize, you can use this:

- (void)resizeImageAtPath:(NSString *)imagePath {
    // Create the image source (from path)
    CGImageSourceRef src = CGImageSourceCreateWithURL((__bridge CFURLRef) [NSURL fileURLWithPath:imagePath], NULL);

    // To create image source from UIImage, use this
    // NSData* pngData =  UIImagePNGRepresentation(image);
    // CGImageSourceRef src = CGImageSourceCreateWithData((CFDataRef)pngData, NULL);

    // Create thumbnail options
    CFDictionaryRef options = (__bridge CFDictionaryRef) @{
            (id) kCGImageSourceCreateThumbnailWithTransform : @YES,
            (id) kCGImageSourceCreateThumbnailFromImageAlways : @YES,
            (id) kCGImageSourceThumbnailMaxPixelSize : @(640)
    };
    // Generate the thumbnail
    CGImageRef thumbnail = CGImageSourceCreateThumbnailAtIndex(src, 0, options); 
    CFRelease(src);
    // Write the thumbnail at path
    CGImageWriteToFile(thumbnail, imagePath);
}

More details here.