Display animated GIF in iOS

I noticed that with iMessage, animated gifs can now be sent and displayed. Does this mean that Apple is now supporting the display of animated GIFs in an application, or is the easiest method still to split the image in frames and then sequentially show them? What is the easiest way to display an animated GIF as of iOS 5.1?

Thanks!

Solution 1:

If you are targeting iOS7 and already have the image split into frames you can use animatedImageNamed:duration:.

Let's say you are animating a spinner. Copy all of your frames into the project and name them as follows:

• spinner-1.png
• spinner-2.png
• spinner-3.png
• etc.,

Then create the image via:

[UIImage animatedImageNamed:@"spinner-" duration:1.0f];

From the docs:

This method loads a series of files by appending a series of numbers to the base file name provided in the name parameter. For example, if the name parameter had ‘image’ as its contents, this method would attempt to load images from files with the names ‘image0’, ‘image1’ and so on all the way up to ‘image1024’. All images included in the animated image should share the same size and scale.

Solution 2:

I would recommend using the following code, it's much more lightweight, and compatible with ARC and non-ARC project, it adds a simple category on UIImageView:

https://github.com/mayoff/uiimage-from-animated-gif/

Solution 3:

FLAnimatedImage is a performant open source animated GIF engine for iOS:

• Plays multiple GIFs simultaneously with a playback speed comparable to desktop browsers
• Honors variable frame delays
• Behaves gracefully under memory pressure
• Eliminates delays or blocking during the first playback loop
• Interprets the frame delays of fast GIFs the same way modern browsers do

It's a well-tested component that I wrote to power all GIFs in Flipboard.