Use PhotosPicker in SwiftUI

Previous to iOS 16, if you want to show a photograph picker for customers to decide on images from Photograph library, you need to depend on PHPickerViewController or the older UIImagePickerController of UIKit. It’s not troublesome to make use of it as you possibly can combine UIKit elements with UIViewControllerRepresentable. That stated, it could be nice if the SwiftUI framework comes with a local view for photograph picker.

In iOS 16, Apple lastly brings PhotosPicker to SwiftUI that it has the identical functionalities as its UIKit counterpart. In case your app will solely help system working iOS 16 or up, you need to use this new view for dealing with photograph choices.

Let’s see the way it works with some pattern code. Please be aware that you want to use Xcode 14 beta 4 to observe this tutorial.

Utilizing PhotosPicker in SwiftUI

The PhotosPicker view is bundled within the PhotosUI framework. Earlier than utilizing it, you need to first import the framework:

Subsequent, we declare a state variable to carry the chosen photograph:

It’s fairly straightforward to deliver up the images picker. Right here is the essential utilization of PhotosPicker:

You instantiate PhotosPicker by passing it a binding to the chosen merchandise and a photograph filter. Within the closure, you describe the looks of the button. With a number of strains of code, Xcode ought to present you a button within the preview.

Should you click on the button, it shows a Pictures picker for selecting photographs from the photograph library. Whenever you select a photograph, the photograph picker routinely dismisses and the chosen photograph merchandise is saved within the selectedItem variable.

Filtering the Pictures

The matching parameter permits you to specify the photograph filter to use to the photograph library. Within the code above, we set its worth to .photographs to indicate photographs solely. If you wish to show each photographs and movies, set the worth of the parameter to the next:

The .photographs filter consists of all photographs within the person’s photograph library. What if you wish to exclude dwell images from the picture set? You possibly can set the worth like this:

You utilize the .not filter to exclude Reside Pictures.

Dealing with the Photograph Choice

As talked about earlier, the chosen photograph is routinely saved within the selectedItem variable, which has a kind of PhotoPickerItem. So, how can we load the photograph and show it on display?

First, we connect the onChange modifier to take heed to the replace of the selectedItem variable. Every time there’s a change, we name the loadTransferable technique to load the asset knowledge.

Within the WWDC22 session (What’s new within the Pictures picker), Apple’s engineer confirmed us to specify the kind as Picture.self. That is to instruct loadTransferable to return an occasion of Picture. Nevertheless, I couldn’t make it work on Xcode 14 beta 4. This is the reason I used Information.self as an alternative. Later, we will convert the information into an UIImage object for displaying in an Picture view.

The selectedPhotoData variable is one other state variable that’s used to carry the information object:

To show the chosen picture in a picture view, we create an occasion of UIImage utilizing the picture knowledge after which go it to the Picture view:

That is the way you deal with the picture choice. To recap, we retrieve the picture knowledge when a person selects a picture from the built-in Pictures library. We save the picture knowledge to a state variable (i.e. selectedPhotoData). SwiftUI detects the worth change and triggers a UI replace to render the photograph on display.

Choosing A number of Pictures

The PhotosPicker view also can help a number of photograph choice. Let’s construct one other fast demo to see the way it works. Once more, we’ve got two state variables to carry the PhotosPickerItem objects and Information object. For the reason that person could choose multiple images, each variables change into an array:

To help a number of photograph choice, the trick is to make use of one other initialization technique of PhotosPicker:

This technique has a further parameter named maxSelection. We set the worth to 5, which suggests the person is allowed to help as much as 5 images. On this case, we could seize multiple images within the onChange closure. What we did is to load every of the photograph objects and add it to the information array (i.e. selectedPhotosData).

For this demo view, as an alternative of making a button on the centre of the display, we put the button within the navigation bar. Right here is the complete code snippet:

When there may be any adjustments of the selectedPhotosData variable, SwiftUI will refresh the UI and show the images within the scroll view.

Should you get pleasure from this text and need to dive deeper into SwiftUI, you could try our Mastering SwiftUI e-book.