Caching Images In Swift

Introduction

Example Gist

Brief Overview

Networking requests in your application can be detrimental to your user experience. This applies in particular when downloading images.

You have to take into account that not all users will have blazing fast internet. Some of these users can have their internet throttled

which will slow down your download rates to a snail’s pace. You also don’t want to harm your users by using up their allotted data

for the month. So what to do? One of the more easiest ways to manage networking data use is to cache data so that you don’t re-download

information, particularly resource heavy data like images. Here is where NSCache comes in.

What is NSCache?

Apple defines NSCache like this:

An NSCache object is a mutable collection that stores key-value pairs, similar to an NSDictionary object. The NSCache class provides a

programmatic interface to adding and removing objects and setting eviction policies based on the total cost and number of objects in the

cache.

This is a unnecessarily wordy explanation for a data structure, similar to a dictionary, that temporarily stores information until it needs more space or is no longer in use. This is unlike CoreData or UserDefaults in that there is no permanence to it.

As wikipedia helpfully puts it:

In computing, a cache is a hardware or software component that stores data so future requests for that data can be served faster; the data stored in a cache might be the result of an earlier computation, or the duplicate of data stored elsewhere.

Side Note

I think it’s important to mention here, in the example that I am using, the URLSession is ephemeral. Ephemeral means to be fleeting, or short lived. What that means for a URLSession is that everything is stored to RAM instead of the disk and is purged automatically when the session is over.

Apple-y definition:

Ephemeral sessions do not store any data to disk; all caches, credential stores, and so on are kept in RAM and tied to the session. Thus, when your app invalidates the session, they are purged automatically.

Let’s get started!

To start off, let’s define our image cache like so:

As you can see, we are caching an image which we can access with an NSString as the key. A good key to store your image by is the URL from where it was downloaded. That way we can do a check before we start our network request. If it exists, we can then skip the whole networking business.

Defining our method

Define a function like the following:

This function takes in a URL and returns a UIImage in the completion. We need to get the string format for our URL which we can do using

url.absoluteString and then casting it to type NSString. Let’s check to see whether our image exists in the cache with the following bit of code:

If the image exists, we immediately pass it to our completion and exit the function.

Wrap up

Example:

Sources: