I am working on a project where i want to make the data, text, images available in offline mode as well.
I fetch data from a web-service which includes image urls and other data. I store the text data in core data entities, however i don't save images locally but fetch them in realtime.
To view images in offline mode i will have to save them to local storage. However i am wondering if it would be the right approach. Saving images to local may possibly eat up a lot of storage on user's device.
What is the best approach to address this problem?
Should i save images to local or should i fetch them on run time only?
Use NSCache. With NSCache you can set a limit to how many images and so on are cached. See Apple's documentation for more details: https://developer.apple.com/reference/foundation/nscache?language=objc
Edit:
Never mind NSCache, just save the images as files. NSCache can still save you network usage and allow your app to be more responsive, but it is not what you want.
Should i save images to local or should i fetch them on run time only?
This question for you , you should decide what you need or what is will be more suitable for your app . at any way if you want to cache images i suggest to use this library SDWebImage
Related
I'm building a mobile app using Meteor. To allow for offline usage of the app, I want the app to be able to download a large-ish json file while online, then access the data in the json file, written to MongoDB, while offline.
This works fine. However, in the downloaded json file, there are plenty of references to online images that won't display in the app once the app is offline.
So, I want to be able to download (a selection of) the images referenced in the json file to the app, so that the app can access them even when offline.
(Downloading images could happen in the background for as long as a connection is available.)
There's an implementation of imgCache.js available on Atmosphere, which fails to initialize for me.
I suppose it's theoretically possible to individually load each image to a canvas, save the canvas content to MongoDB, then load the content when needed. Info on some of this is here. But, this feels rather convoluted and, if really feasible, I would expect someone to have done this before with success.
How can I do achieve caching of images for offline use in Meteor?
So, you've probably already read this article about application cache.
If the images are static, you can just include them in the manifest. Be sure you understand the manifest and cache expirations (see the article).
If the images are dynamic, you'll find some techniques to store images in local storage
If that's the case, this may be what you want.
My app is a mood diary and to save data I've chosen to use Core Data (for strings, images, etc.); to allow the user to restore his diary I've implemented iCloud, that works well with Core Data.
Everything works well if I have not much entries, but when the images saved are too much the app is slow to load data and encounters memory warnings.
To save my images I've chosen Transformable data type and not Binary Data; I know that is not the best way to save images (saving url is surely better), but I need to sync my data on iCloud, and saving images as Transformable allows me to sync data in a simple way (thanks to the possibility offered by Apple Api to link Core Data and iCloud).
What can I do to avoid this memory warnings and sync my app pics on iCloud?
I've considered the possibility to save my pics on a custom photo album (if iCloud is activated for Photo app my app pics would be synchronized), but I need to save them with custom name to retrieve them from camera roll to my app, and for the moment I don't find any solution to save pic with custom name in a custom photo album.
Saving photos in document directory (and saving urls in my core data entity) would be the right choice for local database, but my app pics would not be synchronized.
There are a few things you can try.
First, add an image thumbnail property which stores a smaller version of the image. Use that whenever possible. Loading a bunch of full-size photos needs a lot of memory, so change to loading smaller images whenever your UI allows smaller sizes.
Beyond that you can change how you handle images using one of the following strategies. In ascending order of complexity (and effectiveness):
Make sure "Allows external storage" is enabled for the image property in your data model. This will let Core Data put the images outside the persistent store without requiring you to manage those files. This will save on memory if, for example, you sometimes fetch data but aren't using the image property.
Change the data model so that the image is saved in a different entity, with a relationship linking it to your current entity. This should make it easier to avoid "accidentally" loading images when you're not using them.
Put the images in separate files and keep only the file names in Core Data. You can still sync the images via iCloud, because you can sync files directly via iCloud outside of Core Data. But you'll need extra code to manage uploading/downloading the images. You'll also need to make sure you can handle the case where Core Data has finished syncing but the image is not available yet.
On this list, #1 is easiest but will probably have the least effect. Using #3 should be very effective but will require the most work.
I am fetching images from my server and need to store them on the disk. I was wondering what is the best way to cache these images to prevent excessive requests and traffic. From doing some research it seems that there are many options available but I am not sure which to use.
Core Data
Store in the Cache Resources Folder in the file directory
After storing these is it best to use a NSCache class to put these data into memory for quick access or is Core Data quick enough?
Based on my experience, you could use SDWebImage, which caches the images you request based on their url, so the next time you "request" it, it will check if it is in cache, if so it won't make the request and it will load it from it instead.
I'm not sure why would you need to store the image, maybe you could tell us the reason and see if we can help any further.
I've had great results using FastImageCache by Path.
What Fast Image Cache Does
Stores images of similar sizes and styles together
Persists image data to disk
Returns images to the user significantly faster than traditional methods
Automatically manages cache expiry based on recency of usage
Utilizes a model-based approach for storing and retrieving images
Allows images to be processed on a per-model basis before being stored into the cache
I want to develop the solution where storing of image data downloaded from server and display it.
Scenario is, There will be thumbnail images placed on each row, clicking on that will download the actual image from server and display the image in a bigger view.
I want to store this image data once its downloaded from server, so that in the later stage if the same thumbnail has clicked to open, I don't need to again download the actual image from server, instead I can pull that from the place where I stored locally.
There will be more than 80 thumbnail images placed in rows and corresponding bigger images on the server.
Can I store the image data in a file and store it in documents directory or some thing like that? My worry, if the user selected all the 80 thumbnail images, then i'll have to store all the 80 bigger images locally on the app.
What is the best way to achieve this storing solution? Please advise.
Thank you.
You can store the images in the documents folder, as you already said. Just make sure to exclude them from backups, Apple will reject you for storing too much replaceable data in there.
There are also some third party image cache libraries, most notably (afaik) FastImageCache from Path:
https://github.com/path/FastImageCache
From their website what FastImageCache does is this:
Stores images of similar sizes and styles together
Persists image data to disk
Returns images to the user significantly faster than traditional methods
Automatically manages cache expiry based on recency of usage
Utilizes a model-based approach for storing and retrieving images
Allows images to be processed on a per-model basis before being stored into the cache
I have an application which downloads its product data(descipttions and images) from server and stores them localy to be available offline. For product images I'm using forge.file.cacheURL which works great but on my iPAD, this cache is being cleared during the day when I work with another apps. This causes my application to have only descipription texts available without images and user must connect to internet and synchronize again what is quite annoying. Is there a better way how to implement this scenario?
Have you tried to use the forge.prefs module for this purpose? It allows you so persistantly save key-value-pairs locally (much like HTML5 localstorage). Read more about the exact syntax in Trigger.io's official API documentation.
I'm not quite sure whether its possible to save images with this method, but you could easily transform your images into strings and vice-versa. Check out the second chapter of this post by Robert Nyman on how to save images in localStorage.