UIImagePickerController run out of memory with camera source - ios

Question

I got a big performance issue using UIImagePickerController and saving the image on disk. I can't figure out what I am doing wrong. Here is my code:
- (void)imagePickerController:(UIImagePickerController *)pick
didFinishPickingMediaWithInfo:(NSDictionary *)info {
UIImage *image = [info objectForKey:#"UIImagePickerControllerOriginalImage"];
NSData *imageData = [NSData dataWithData:UIImagePNGRepresentation(image)];
iPixAppDelegate *delegate = (iPixAppDelegate *)[[UIApplication sharedApplication] delegate];
[delegate addPicture:imageData];
}
The addPicture method creates a new picture object that is initialized this way:
- (Picture*) initPicture:(NSData*)dat inFolder:(NSString*)pat {
self.data = dat;
NSDate *d = [NSDate date];
NSDateFormatter *formatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[formatter setDateFormat:#"yyyy-mm-dd hh-mm-ss"];
self.name = [[formatter stringFromDate:d] stringByAppendingString:#".png"]; //The name by default of a picture is the date it has been taken
[formatter release];
self.path = [pat stringByAppendingPathComponent:self.name];
if(![self fileExistsAtPath:self.path]){
[self.data writeToFile:self.path atomically:YES];
}
return self;
}
The UIImagePickerController is quite fast but the program becomes very slow when I save picture on the disk.
Any idea on what I am doing wrong?

Answer 1

I had a similar issue. The way I got round it was to handle the image from the picker in a seperate thread. My problem was the main thread handling my app/UI was crashing out when trying to close the picker and handle the image:
- (void)imagePickerController:(UIImagePickerController *)picker
didFinishPickingImage:(UIImage *)image
editingInfo:(NSDictionary *)editingInfo
{
[[picker parentViewController] dismissModalViewControllerAnimated:YES];
NSLog(#"picker did finish");
[NSThread detachNewThreadSelector:#selector(useImage:) toTarget:self withObject:image];
}

Answer 2

Your problem might be due to you taking the original image.
The original image from the camera has a resolution of around 1200x1400, which is a lot of memory and will cause the device to crash if you try making a picture out of it (it will run out of memory).
I would suggest resizing the image to be smaller (the native 320x480).