Slow loading of images in UITableViewController extracted from URL string - ios

Question

I'm trying to load images extracted from the web URL into the image view of each cell.
However, when i scroll the table the screen will freeze as I believe it is attempting to grab the images for each cell 1 by 1.
Is there a way i can make it asynchronous? The resources available out there currently is outdated or incompatible(running obj c) as I'm running on Swift 2
The relevant code I'm using within the table view controller is below :
override func tableView(newsFeedTableView: UITableView, cellForRowAtIndexPath indexPath: NSIndexPath) -> UITableViewCell {
let cell = tableView.dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier("Cell", forIndexPath: indexPath)
let blogPost: BlogPost = blogPosts[indexPath.row]
cell.textLabel?.text = blogPost.postTitle
let unformattedDate = blogPost.postDate
//FORMATTING: Splitting of raw data into arrays based on delimiter '+" to print only useful information
let postDateArr = unformattedDate.characters.split{$0 == "+"}.map(String.init)
cell.detailTextLabel?.text = postDateArr[0]
let url = NSURL(string: blogPost.postImageUrl)
let data = NSData(contentsOfURL: url!)
cell.imageView!.image = UIImage(data: data!)//WHY SO SLOW!?
print(blogPost.postImageUrl)
return cell
}

Answer 1

Try this
var image: UIImage
dispatch_async(dispatch_get_global_queue(DISPATCH_QUEUE_PRIORITY_DEFAULT, 0), {() -> Void in
// Background thread stuff.
let url = NSURL(string: blogPost.postImageUrl)
let data = NSData(contentsOfURL: url!)
image = UIImage(data:data)
dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue(), {() -> Void in
// Main thread stuff.
cell.imageView.image = image
})
})

Answer 2

Lets clean your code a bit. First of all, you are trying to declear ALL your cells in your viewController. That means your app is not trying to load every image one byt one, but more like everything all together.
You need to create a separate file called PostCell what is going to be a type of UITableViewCell.
Then you need to go to your prototype cell and connect those view elements to that PostCell just like you would add those to any other ViewController.
Now, here is new code to your cellForRowAtIndexPath function:
override func tableView(newsFeedTableView: UITableView, cellForRowAtIndexPath indexPath: NSIndexPath) -> UITableViewCell {
let blogPost = blogPosts[indexPath.row]
if let cell = tableView.dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier("Cell") as? PostCell {
cell.configureCell(blogPost)
return cell
}
return UITableViewCell() // You need to do this because of if let
}
And declear this on that PostCell:
func configureCell(post: BlogPost) {
this.textLabel.text = post.postTitle
let postDateArr = unformattedDate.characters.split{$0 == "+"}.map(String.init)
this.detailTextLabel.text = postDateArr[0]
// I would add few if let declarations here too, but if you are sure all these forced ! variables do exciest, then its ok
let url = NSURL(string: blogPost.postImageUrl)
let data = NSData(contentsOfURL: url!)
this.imageView.image = UIImage(data: data!)
}
Or something along those lines. When you connect those elements to your cell, you will get proper variable names for those.
That SHOULD help. There are plenty of tutorials how to make a custom tableviewcell. Some of them advice to put all the declarations inside that cellForRowAtIndexPath, but I have found that it get's problematic very fast.
So...my advice in a nutscell...create a custom tableviewcell.
Hope this helps! :)

Answer 3

To load the image on every cell use SDWebImage third party library. You can add it using pods as put pod 'SDWebImage' It provides various methods to load the image with caching or without caching asynchronously. With caching you don't really need to worry about loading image data every time cell appears on the screen. Try this
override func tableView(newsFeedTableView: UITableView, cellForRowAtIndexPath indexPath: NSIndexPath) -> UITableViewCell {
if let cell = tableView.dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier("Cell") as? PostCell {
--reset your cell here--
// cell.imageView.image = nil
}
cell.imageView.sd_setImageWithURL(YOUR_URL, placeholderImage: UIImage(named: "")) {
(UIImage img, NSError err, SDImageCacheType cacheType, NSURL imgUrl) -> Void in
// Do awesome things
}
-- configure your cell here --
}