Load image from Firestore and save it to cache in Swift - ios

Question

I'm working on an app that has to load some images and data from server on every launch (to make sure it's using up-to-date info). I'm using Firestore as a DB and currently storing images in it as an URL to Firebase storage.
Is it somehow possible to store an actual image in Firestore? And how can I cache loaded image? Either from
UIImage(contentsOf: URL)
or from Firestore?

Answer 1

Try this Asynchronous image downloader with cache support as a UIImageView category - http://cocoadocs.org/docsets/SDWebImage
It is called sdwebimage really easy to use

Answer 2

I don't know if that's the most efficient way of solving my problem but I did it the following way:
In my Firestore DB I stored references to images in Cloud Storage. Then when app starts for the first time, it loads those files from Firestore DB using default methods AND saves those images in app's container (Documents folder) using Swift's FileManager().
Next time the app starts, it goes through references array and skips the files which are already in app's container.

Answer 3

You could use the bytes type in Firestore (see a list of types) to save whatever binary data you want (use NSData on iOS), but this is almost certainly not what you actually want to do. The limit for the size of an entire document is 1 MB, and images can easily exceed that. Also, you'll be paying the cost of downloading that image to the client any time that document is read, which could be wasteful.
You'll be far better off storing the actual file data in Cloud Storage (using the Firebase SDK on the client), then storing a reference or URL to that in the document, and fetch it from there only when needed.

Answer 4

You could use https://github.com/pinterest/PINRemoteImage, this framework use https://github.com/pinterest/PINCache
import PINRemoteImage
extension UIImageView {
public func setImageFrom(urlString: String!, animated: Bool = false) {
guard let urlString = urlString else {
return
}
guard let url = URL(string: urlString) else {
return
}
layer.removeAllAnimations()
pin_cancelImageDownload()
image = nil
if !animated {
pin_setImage(from: url)
} else {
pin_setImage(from: url, completion: { [weak self] result in
guard let _self = self else { return }
_self.alpha = 0
UIView.transition(with: _self, duration: 0.5, options: [], animations: { () -> Void in
_self.image = result.image
_self.alpha = 1
}, completion: nil)
})
}
}
}
....
UIImageView(). setImageFrom(urlString: "https://ssssss")