Is there anyway to load a bunch of images from Resources? - objective-c

Hey guys, im getting a little problem here. I am getting a Level 1 Warning from my debug.
So, i think the best solution for it is loading every images of resource, to prevent crash the app like it are doing.
So, whats the best way to do it?
Thanks!

There are several strategies to reduce memory usage if you're working with lots of images. The warning you're getting doesn't necessarily mean that main memory is running out, but you could be running low on video ram.
Reduce the image size before adding them to your project, both by scaling them down and/or compressing image data.
Load only the images you need at a particular time - avoid trying to keep all images in memory.
Load images using (UIImage)imageWithContentsOfFile: rather than (UIImage)imageNamed: (the latter reads an caches images immediately, the former is more "lazy").
Be aggressive in 'release'ing images - don't wait for autorelease to kick in, but send [image release];
Simplify other aspects of your code that use video ram (e.g. remove layer transparency, remove views that aren't currently visible, etc.)

Your question needs more details I think to get a clear answer.
Anyway, the best solution not to get a memory warning while loading "a bunch of images"...
is...
Not loading these images! Only load required images "on demand".
For example if you have images in a table view, make cells loads images only when they are visible.

Related

Huge images in iOS app without CATiledLayer?

I have an image at about 7000x6000px. I need this to be in a scrollview/imageView in my app, however this is way to huge for display. It is supposed to be a kind of map. I was hoping to keep the size of the app to the minimum, and the image is just about 13mb in .jpg. In .png it is over 100mb, which is unacceptable. Many have suggested CATiledLayer as an option, but I believe this would result in even bigger file sizes. Anyway, I tried to do it with CATiledLayer, and create my own tiles in TileCutter, (tiles in .jpg), and the size wasn't too bad. But I am having errors all over the place. The iOS version of CATiledLayer is a mystery to me, and I can't find a way to solve this. I get an error saying something about the java-equivalent "index out of bounds of array", even though the array has content at that specific index..
It has a method which returns an array. The array contains data of a .plist. Before the return I log out the content of the array, giving me good data. The call is trying to access
[array objectAtIndex:0]
and put it in a dictionary, but throws OutOfBounds. When logged out the whole array, I can clearly see the content, but when logged out
NSLog("%#",[method objectAtIndex]); I get the same exception.
Anyway, CATiledLayer has given me nothing but problems. I have been reverse-engineering the PhotoScroller project with no luck. Anyone have any other solutions?
Thanks.
Apple has this really neat project, PhotoScroller, that uses CATiledLayer and lets you scroll through several images and zoom them. This seemed really neat until I found out that Apple "cheated" and pre-tiled the images (about 800 tiles saved as file in the bundle!)
I had need for a similar capability, but had to download the images from the network. Thus came about PhotoScrollerNetwork. With the TiledImageBuilder you can download (or read from disk) massive images - I even tested a 18000x18000 image - and it works.
What this class does is start tiling the image as it downloads (when using libjpegturbo) or can save the file then tile (takes longer). The class figures out how many levels of detail are needed to show the image at full resolution and sized to fit in the containing view (a scrollview).
The class uses the disk cache to hold the tiles, but uses and old Unix trick of creating a file, opening it, then unlinking it so that the tiles never really get saved - once the class is dealloced (and the file descriptor closed) the tiles are freed (or if your app crashes they get freed too.
Someone had problems on an iPad 1 with its quite limited memory, so the class now throttles its use of the file system when concurrently loading multiple images. I had a discussion with the iOS kernel manager at WWDC this year, and after explaining the throttling technique to him, he said the algorithm (on managing the amount of disk cache usage) was probably the best technique that could be used.
I think those who suggested CATiledLayer are right. You should really use it! If you need a sample project that displays a huge bitmap using that technology, look here: http://www.cimgf.com/2011/03/01/subduing-catiledlayer/
Many technologies we use as Cocoa/Cocoa Touch developers stand
untouched by the faint of heart because often we simply don’t
understand them and employing them can seem a daunting task. One of
those technologies is found in Core Animation and is referred to as
the CATiledLayer. It seems like a magical sort of technology because
so much of its implementation is a bit of a black box and this fact
contributes to it being misunderstood. CATiledLayer simply provides a
way to draw very large images without incurring a severe memory hit.
This is important no matter where you’re deploying, but it especially
matters on iOS devices as memory is precious and when the OS tells you
to free up memory, you better be able to do so or your app will be
brought down. This blog post is intended to demonstrate that
CATiledLayer works as advertised and implementing it is not as hard as
it may have once seemed.

Resizable image resource with embedded cap insets

This is by far not a showstopper problem just something I've been curious about for some time.
There is this well-known -[UIImage resizableImageWithCapInsets:] API for creating resizable images, which comes really handy when texturing variable size buttons and frames, especially on the retina iPad and especially if you have lots of those and you want to avoid bloating the app bundle with image resources.
The cap insets are typically constant for a given image, no matter what size we want to stretch it to. We can also put that this way: the cap insets are characteristic for a given image. So here is the thing: if they logically belong to the image, why don't we store them together with the image (as some kind of metadata), instead of having to specify them everywhere where we got to create a new instance?
In the daily practice, this could have serious benefits, mainly by means of eliminating the possibility of human error in the process. If the designer who creates the images could embed the appropriate cap values upon exporting in the image file itself then the developers would no longer have to write magic numbers in the code and maintain them updated each time the image changes. The resizableImage API could read and apply the caps automatically. Heck, even a category on UIImage would make do.
Thus my question is: is there any reliable way of embedding metadata in images?
I'd like to emphasize these two words:
reliable: I have already seen some entries on the optional PNG chunks but I'm afraid those are wiped out of existence once the iOS PNG optimizer kicks in. Or is there a way to prevent that? (along with letting the optimizer do its job)
embedding: I have thought of including the metadata in the filename similarly to what Apple does, i.e. "#2x", "~ipad" etc. but having kilometer-long names like "image-20.0-20.0-40.0-20.0#2x.png" just doesn't seem to be the right way.
Can anyone come up with smart solution to this?
Android has a filetype called nine-patch that is basically the pieces of the image and metadata to construct it. Perhaps a class could be made to replicate it. http://developer.android.com/reference/android/graphics/NinePatch.html

Is there a nice way to share a CCTextureAtlas among multiple CCTMXTiledMaps?

Good day, I'm new to cocos2d, objective-c and stack overflow.
I would like to know if it's possible to share a texture atlas instance among multiple tiled maps. I'm working on a map system, which is supposed to be able to use a really, really huge map but since it needs to run on an iPhone, I have to slice that map into many small ones to be able to cull them so I have multiple CCTMXTiledMaps in my scene which get constantly allocated and deallocated.
This works fine but on every allocation of a tiled map there is a CCTextureAtlas generated which freezes the app during the loading time and uses up a lot of memory even if the tile graphics are everywhere the same.
I looked around but all tutorials just cover the case with only one tiled map. I also tried some awful hacking, but that just caused crashes. I think, I have to setup a tiled map instance manually (not with the loadFromFile function) so I have more control of the initialization but I have no clue of what I have to consider during that.
If you have loaded the textures before, the tilemaps shouldn't freeze the game significantly.

Can I save memory by reducing image size?

i've a lot of images as background and other decorations.
If i reduce their resolution and their size, the memory used by all application will be reduced or will i not have advantages?
Thank you.
If the size of the file is reduced it will use less memory. 1 thing you could do is using sprites instead of images, though using a sprite in objective-c is a bit more difficult than it is on the web.
You could also try to replace images with custom drawing code in subclasses of views.
Yes, if you reduce image resolution, there will be less data to keep in memory and total memory usage will go down. But remember the basic rule of optimization and measure first, so that you know for sure that reducing image size will really make a difference given the rest of your application. (As an example, if you have serious leaks in your application, there’s not much to be gained by resampling images.)

Ajax request to SQL returns hundreds of images to JSON -> CSS Sprites? Base64?

We are writing a Web-based events calendar with thousands of theatre shows, festivals, and concerts in a SQL database.
The user goes to the Website, performs a search, the SQL server returns JSON, and jQuery code on the client side displays the 200+ events.
Our problem is that each event has an image. If I return URLs, the browser has to make 200+ HTTP GET requests for these tiny (2-4Kb) images.
It is tempting to pack all the images into one CSS sprite, but since the user searches can return any combination of images, this would have to be done dynamically and we'd lose control over caching. Every search would have to return every image in a brand new CSS sprite. Also, we want to avoid any solution that requires dynamically reading or writing from a filesystem: that would be way too slow.
I'd rather return binary images as part of the JSON, and keep track of which images we already have cached and which we really need. But I can't figure out how. It seems to require converting to Base64? Is there any example code on this?
Thanks for any help you can give! :)
The web site you are using (StackOverflow) has to provide 50 avatars for 50 questions shown in the questions page. How does it do it? Browser makes 50 requests.
I would say, you had better implement pagination so that the list does not get too big. Also you can load images on the background or when the user scrolls and gets to the image.
Keeping track of images downloaded is not our job, it is browser's. Our job is to make sure the URL is unique and consistent and response headers allow caching.
Also base64 will make the stream at least 33% longer while it's processing on the client side is not trivial - I have never seen an implementation but probably someone has done some javascript for it.
I believe all you need is just pagination.
It looks like the original poster has proceeded with essentially this solution on their own, however based on their comment about 33% space overhead, I don't think they observed an unexpected phenomenon that you get when base64-ing a bunch of images into one response entity and then gzipping it...believe it or not, this can easily produce an overall transfer size that is smaller than the total of the unencoded image files, even if each unencoded image was also separately gzipped.
I've covered this JSON technique for accelerated image presentation in depth here as an alternative to CSS sprites, complete with a couple live samples. It aims show that it is often a superior technique to CSS sprites.
Data is never random. For example you could name your sprites
date_genre_location.jpg
or however you organise your searches. This might be worth it. Maybe.
You'll need to do the math
Here is what we decided.
Creating sprites has some downsides:
To reduce image loss, we need to store the originals as PNGs instead of JPEGs on the server. This is going to add to the slowness, and there's already quite some slowness in creating dynamic CSS sprites with ImageMagick.
To reduce image size, the final CSS sprite must be a JPG, but JPGs are lossy and with a grid of images, things get weird at the edges as JPG tries to blend and compress. We can fix that by putting a blank border around all the images but even so, this adds complexity.
with CSS sprites, it becomes harder to do intelligent caching; we have to pack up all the images regardless of what we've sent in the past. (or we have to keep all the old CSS sprites regardless of whether they contain many or few images we still need).
I'm afraid we have too many combinations of date-category-location for precomputing CSS sprites, although surely we could handle part of the data this way
Thus our solution is to Base64 it, to actually send each image one by one. Despite the 33% overhead, it is far less complex to code and manage and when you take caching issues into account, it may even be less data transfer.
Thank you all for your advice on this!