I want to make an iOS app. This app will have over 200 images, each with different sizes (500x500[maybe smaller] and less). What is the best method to keep them, having a smaller app size?
I think about optimizing their sizes for web in photoshop, but still the app will have a big size if I want to keep and a respectful quality.
Any ideas?
Well, I don't know if you can do this for your app, but you can download them from the internet once the user installed your app. This way you can keep the size of the package as small as possible (I assume you talk about non-critical images, that can be obtain afterwards).
UPDATE
Alternatively you can use SVG instead of bitmaps, of course if applicable:
how to render svg file in iphone and ipad
Related
I have a tableview that is populated from images on my server that I download. My question is How would I go about getting different images for the different resolutions for the devices? 6 vs 6plus etc?
Do I write code that is device specific? e.g
if device is equal to 6 load #2x images 'from #2x url'
else if
device is equal to 6 plus load #3x images 'from #3x url'
and so on.
Or is there a more efficient way of going about this?
You've got several options, depending on the back-end technology stack you're connecting to.
Options if you're using a custom server that you've built yourself, or have control over the code:
Add device scale detection into your image service that checks the inbound user-agent for device scale, and serves the appropriate image for that device. This is hands down probably the simplest solution to implement if you manage your own back-end.
Write into your API a url path param that serves the appropriate image scale; you can then use the UIScreen class (UIScreen.mainScreen().scale) to adjust your target URL accordingly, e.g.:
https://api.yourbackend.service/images/{imageid}/#2x.jpg
This is arguably more difficult to implement, but it's also a lot more robust (doesn't rely on potentially changing user-agent strings), and it's a lot cleaner when logging or querying analytics.
You could probably also use something like retina.js to handle this on your back-end, though I can't tell you whether or not it will work heedlessly (haven't tried it).
Options if you're using a CDN image host:
Use their built in HiDPI support (Cloudinary, for example, provides this -- read about it here).
If your CDN doesn't support this, switch to one that does ;)
You are coming at this exactly backwards.
A table view cell's image view is tiny. You are not going to be showing these images at full size anyway. So there is no point whatever downloading larger and larger images only to be displayed at tiny sizes. That's a massive waste of time, bandwidth, and ultimately memory (if you really try to display large images in every cell, you will run out of memory and crash).
If you have a choice of image size to be retrieved from the server, you should be doing just the opposite of what you are suggesting: download a thumbnail of your image suitable for display in the table view. If the thumbnail is twice the size of the image view, it will look good at all resolutions with minimal waste of memory.
If this app is about also fetching the real full-sized image, outside your table view, you can do that later when requested by the user.
I am working on an iOS application that will show photos either in full screen or in frames in various sizes - like product catalog.
I know I am supposed to use images.xcassets to make things simple and I know I am supposed to create more than one version of the same photo in different sizes.
All I can find is AppIcon and LaunchImage guidelines. What would be the rules I should follow preparing photos to show in different devices? Sizes, resolutions?
Sample: I have 2048 x 1536 raw sized photo (even bigger ones). When it comes to prepare it for iOS app (will work both in iPad and iPhone), what are the dimensions to export my photos from PhotoShop? What would be the biggest sized version?
Could someone please show me a starting point to understand this?
Thanks in advance.
This design guidelines guide is very good. You will find everything you have to know about sizes.
But the simplest way is to use a tool like Asset Catalog Creator to generate your assets. Just drop your original image in it, select your #1x size, and it will generate the catalog for you, for all sizes.
Here is a screen size reference for iPhone devices you may find helpful. Here's one for iPads.
Additionally, if you've got a lot of files you need to resize that you've already exported, you might consider using ImageMagick for batch resizing.
I know this is a stupid problem, but this is my first real app that I have to make, I have no one to ask and I looked up this problem and found no other similar problems.
My app crashes on real devices with no exception. I saw in the simulator that uses too much RAM and after a while I got to the conclusion that the pictures I am using are to blame.
The app is structured in this way: it has 8 viewControllers for different things: for example, it starts with one which lets the user select the avatar with which he/she will play and here I have two pictures, next is a viewController which shows the stats for that avatar and here it is another picture and so on. The problem is that each picture uses 40MB of RAM to be displayed and things add up so the app uses more than 300MB of RAM when the user gets to the gameviewCOntroller where the game is. Because of this, on devices like iPAD 2 or iphone 4 it crashes, but not on iphone 5.
I tried to set the images both from "images.xcassets" and from a ".atlas" folder, but the result is exactly the same. The pictures have a dimension of no more than 1500x1999px, they are in png format.
Also, I saw that if the app were to start directly into the gaveViewController it would use 180MB so the other viewController remain in memory or something like that. Should I "clear" them or something similar?
//-------update-------
This is what I got from Instruments:
Memory is a big deal on mobile devices, there is not a clear answer to you question, but I can give you some advices:
If your images are plain colors or have symmetric axes use resizable images. You can just use one line of pixel multiplied by with or height to cover the entire screen using a small amount of memory
Image compression doens't have effects when the image is decompressed. So if you have a png that is 600kb and you are thinking that converting in a 300kb will lower memory usage is only true for "disk space" when an image is decompressed in memory the size is widthXheightXNumber_of_channelXbit_for_channel
resize images: if are loading a 2000px square image into memory and you show it inside an image view of 800 px square, resize before adding it.You will have just a peak while resizing, but later it will use less memory
If you need to use big images, use tiling techniques such as CATiledLayer
If you don't need an image anymore get rid of it. It's ok to have an array of path to images, but not an array of full uncompressed images
Avoid -imageNamed it caches images and even if Apple says that this cache is released under memory pressure, you don't have a lot of control on it and it could be too late to avoid a crash
Those are general advices, it's up to you if they fit your requirements.
You should definitely follow Andrea's advices.
Additionally you should consider setting the image size to exactly what your need is. You're saying that you've tried to set them from xcassets so you have full control over the images you're loading, which is great (compared to downloading an image that you cannot modify).
I highly suggest you read some documentation on using Asset catalog files. This will allow you to have high-resolution image for bigger screens that also have more memory, and smaller ones for older devices, which is what you want here.
Also, note that 1500x1999px is still a very big size for most mobile devices.
More links about screen-size:
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/MobileHIG/IconMatrix.html
http://www.paintcodeapp.com/news/iphone-6-screens-demystified
I am going to work on client application, in which he need to have whole app locally resources loading, and I have almost 70mb images files for iPad. I am going to start development soon but before that I need healthy suggestion and guidelines to reduce my app size with these images use locally. I don't want to make this heavy size like any 3d game? So I am looking for suggestion what should I do? Thanks in advance.
There are few ways:
zip all the image resources in the bundle. On first launch, extract that zip folder into documents directory and refer the image from there only. You will have to do it on first launch only.
create jpeg version of your images with some reduced quality. Apart from icon and splash, you can use jpeg version of images.
If possible, use 1 pixel width/height images for repetitive gradients.
I am developing an iphone application and i am using a background picture for my app. I know that before iphone 4 , the resolution of the screen was 480x320 and after 960x640. I read that i should use 2 images like : MyImage.png and MyImage#2x.png with the 2 different resolutions and the app will know which one to choose according to the phone. My question is very simple. If i just use the 960x480 , whats the difference? I am developing on an iphone 3gs and i am using this resolution and everything works perfect. So why have a small resolution for these phones?
The difference, in my opinion, is the following: the phone is going to resize the doubled-resolution to half the size, and this will lead to (1) the final image is not as smooth as if you would have exported it from a image application like Illustrator or Photoshop - at least from my own experience, when I export both resolutions, in non retina devices, the images don't look as good if I had exported the normal resolution. Also (2) the device will waste time/performance to make this conversion, although I don't know how much it is significant. And (3) finally, you may overload memory with no need, considering that the doubled sized images are bigger files, and you could use smaller files instead.
If you don't mind about this issues, you can go ahead. Try yourself.
If nothing else, the high-resolution images will tax the memory much more. One full-screen image at 320✕480 is around 600K in memory, whereas the 640✕960 is almost 2.5M, four times as much. On the older devices the memory is much more scarce than on the new ones and you might run into problems later in the development cycle, when there are more resources in play.
Even if you are able to test the app on all older supported devices and you can guarantee that there are no immediate performance problems or visual glitches, the app will take more memory, forcing the OS to kill other apps more frequently (= worse overall user experience).
if you use one version of image, (960x640) , there will be a memory overhead when the app run on non-retina. you dont need to display the high res in non-retina, only in retina display, making two versions of images .png and #2x.png will tell ios which image version it should load, depends on what device is currently in use.