iOS AssetLibrary Storing Pointer

Question

I have a question on using the AssetLibrary with iOS. It it possible to store a pointer to an image in your app rather than the actual image? Let's say I want to create a playlist, but I don't want to store the actual image.

The reason I am asking, is that I find when I use the image picker, I can save an image to the devices documents directory, but once I get to 25 or so, it starts to slow down the device (iPad 1). I scale down the images if they are very large, I ran through the leaks instrument many times, and there are no leaks. I am just at a loss as to where to turn next, so I wanted to investigate alternatives. As I see nowhere where I can free up memory.

That's where I am at now, I'm curious if the AssetLibrary might be a option since I won't be storing physical images. I know it has some dis-advantages (requires users location, can be a bit slow when looping through images)

Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Storing 25 images to the documents directory shouldn't slow down the device, unless you're trying to load all 25 extremely large images into memory at the same time.

You can't permanently store a pointer to the assets library asset, but you can store the URL you retrieve from the ALAssetRepresentation's url property and then use ALAssetsLibrary's assetForURL:resultBlock:failureBlock: to get back the corresponding ALAsset later. Do note that it is possible for the user to delete the asset from outside your program, even when your app is in the background, so if you are hanging on to an ALAsset you must listen for ALAssetsLibraryChangedNotification to know when to reload the assets.