adding UIImageView in UIScrollview with large image blocks thread - objective-c

Question

I am loading an image in a UIImageView which I then add to a UIScrollView.
The image is a local image and is about 5000 pixels in height.
The problem is that when I add the UIImageView to the UIScrollView the thread is blocked.
It is obvious because when I do this I can not scroll the UIScrollView till the image is displayed.
Here's the example.
UIScrollView *myscrollview = [[UIScrollView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0, 0, 768, 1004)];
myscrollview.contentSize = CGSizeMake(7680, 1004);
myscrollview.pagingEnabled = TRUE;
[self.view addSubview:myscrollview];
NSString* str = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:#"APPS.jpg" ofType:nil inDirectory:#""];
NSData *imageData = [NSData dataWithContentsOfFile:str];
UIImageView *singleImageView = [[UIImageView alloc] initWithImage:[UIImage imageWithData:imageData]];
//the line below is the blocking line
[scrollView addSubview:singleImageView];
It is the last line in the script that blocks the scroller. When I leave it out everything works perfect, except for the fact the image is not showing of course.
I seem to recall that using multithreading does not work on UIView operations so I guess that's out of the question ass well.
Thanks for your kind help.

Answer 1

If you're providing these large images, you should maybe check out CATiledLayer; there's a video of a good presentation on how to use this from WWDC 2010.
If these aren't your images, and you can't downsample them or break them into tiles, you can draw the image on a background thread. You may not draw to the screen graphics context on any main thread but the main thread, but that doesn't prevent you from drawing to a non-screen graphics context. On your background thread you can
create a drawing context with CGBitmapContextCreate
draw your image on it just as you would draw onto the screen in drawRect:
when you're done loading and drawing the image invoke your view's drawRect: method on the main thread using performSelectorOnMainThread:withObject:waitUntilDone:
In your view's drawRect: method, once you've fully drawn your image on the in-memory context, copy it to the screen using CGBitmapContextCreateImage and CGContextDrawImage.
This isn't trivial, you'll need to start your background thread at the right time, synchronize access to your images, etc. The CATiledLayer approach is almost certainly the better one if you can find a way to manipulate the images to make that work.

Answer 2

Why you want to load such huge image to memory at one time? split it into many small images and load/free it dynamically.

Answer 3

Try allocating the UIImageView without a UIImage, and add it as a sub-view to the UIScrollView.
Load the UIImage in a separate thread, and get the method running on the other thread to set the image property of the UIImageView when the image is loaded into memory. Also you'll probably encounter some memory problems as an image of this size loaded into a UIImage will probably be 30MB+
UIScrollView *myscrollview = [[UIScrollView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0, 0, 768, 1004)];
myscrollview.contentSize = CGSizeMake(7680, 1004);
myscrollview.pagingEnabled = TRUE;
[self.view addSubview:myscrollview];
NSString* str = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:#"APPS.jpg" ofType:nil inDirectory:#""];
UIImageView *singleImageView = [[UIImageView alloc] init];
[scrollView addSubview:singleImageView];
//Then fire off a method on another thread to load the UIImage and set the image
//property of the UIImageView.
Just keep an eye on memory and beware of using convenience constructors with UIImage (or any object that could end up being huge)
Also where are you currently running this code?