PINRemoteImage is a new and promising solution for asynchronously downloading images. It was created by the team at Pinterest and has been battle tested in their extremely popular iOS app. Let's import PINRemoteImage, take a look at how to use it, and see what it can do:

let imageURL = NSURL(string: "http://apple.com/iCar.png")
imageView.setImageFromURL(imageURL)

Images are downloaded and decoded off the main thread. They're then cached using a fast, non-deadlocking parallel object cache. (Courtesy of another Pinterest library, PINCache). Upon subsequent requests the in-memory, then disk caches will be checked before re-downloading.

Processing

You can process the image before caching occurs. Here we'll use Toucan (covered in Bite #40) to convert the image into a circular avatar.

imageView.setImageFromURL(
  imageURL, 
  placeholderImage: placeholder, 
  processorKey: "circleAvatar"
) { (result, cost) -> UIImage! in
  return Toucan.Mask.maskImageWithEllipse(result.image)
}

Progressive JPEGs

Optionally, you can enable a mode supporting progressive JPEG images. They're treated with a nice blur effect, so they look great even at low resolutions.

imageView.updateWithProgress = true

Animated GIF Support

PINRemoteImage also comes with built-in support for Flipboard's blazing fast animated GIF library, FLAnimatedImage. All you have to do to use it is create an FLAnimatedImageView instead of a UIImageView:

let animatedImageView = FLAnimatedImageView(frame: GIFRect)

let GIFURL = NSURL(string: "http://apple.com/eddy-dance.gif")
animatedImageView.setImageFromURL(GIFURL)

// #GIFnotJIF

More info about PINRemoteImage can be found at git.io/pri