NSImageView with high-resolution image causes extreme slowdown when resizing the window

Question

I am creating a simple photo filter app for OS X and I am displaying a photo on an NSImageView (actually two photos on top of each other with two NSImageViews, but the question still applies for a single view too). Everything works super, but when I try to resize the window that contains the NSImageViews, the window (which also resizes the NSImageViews) resizes very slowly, at about less than 1fps, creating a negative impact on the user experience. I want resizing windows to be as smooth as possible. When I disable resizing the image views, the window resizes smoothly, so the cause of the slowdown is those NSImageViews.

I'm loading 20-megapixel images from my DSLR. When I scale them down to a reasonable size for screen (e.g. 1024x768), they scale smoothly, so the problem is the way NSImageView renders the images. It (I assume as the result of this behavior) tries to re-render 20MP image every time it needs to redraw it into whatever the target frame of the view is.

How can I make NSImageView rescale more smoothly? Should I feed it with a scaled-down version of my images? I don't want to do that as it's a photo editing app that also targets retina display screens and the viewport would actually be quite large. I can do it, but it's my final option. Other than scaling down, how can I make NSImageView resize faster?

Answer 1

I believe part of the solution your are looking for is in NSImage's representations. You can add many representations to an image with addRepresentation: I believe there is some intelligent selection done when drawing. In your case, I think you would need to add both representations (the scaled-down and the full resolution bitmap) to NSImage. I strongly suspect drawRect: should pick the low resolution version. I would make sure "scale up or down" is selected in NSImageView, because the default is scale down only, which may force your full resolution image to be used most of the time. There are some discussion in Apple's documentation regarding "matching" under "Setting the Image Representation Selection Criteria" in NSImage, although at first sight this may not be sufficient.

Then, whenever you need to do something with the full image, you would request the full resolution image by going through the representations ([NSImage representations] returns an array of NSImageRep).