Find out how to Use PhotosPicker in SwiftUI

Previous to iOS 16, if you have to show a photograph picker for customers to decide on pictures from Photograph library, it’s a must to depend on PHPickerViewController or the older UIImagePickerController of UIKit. It’s not troublesome to make use of it as you’ll be able to combine UIKit elements with UIViewControllerRepresentable. That mentioned, it will 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 picks.

Let’s see the way it works with some pattern code. Please be aware that you have 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, it’s a must to first import the framework:

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

It’s fairly simple to carry up the pictures picker. Right here is the fundamental 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 just a few strains of code, Xcode ought to present you a button within the preview.

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

Filtering the Pictures

The matching parameter helps 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 consumer’s photograph library. What if you wish to exclude dwell pictures from the picture set? You’ll be able to set the worth like this:

You employ the .not filter to exclude Dwell Pictures.

Dealing with the Photograph Choice

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

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 sort 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. For this reason I used Knowledge.self as an alternative. Later, we are able to 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 consumer 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 screen.

Choosing A number of Pictures

The PhotosPicker view can even help a number of photograph choice. Let’s construct one other fast demo to see the way it works. Once more, we have now two state variables to carry the PhotosPickerItem objects and Knowledge object. For the reason that consumer might choose multiple pictures, 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 an extra parameter named maxSelection. We set the worth to 5, which suggests the consumer is allowed to help as much as 5 pictures. On this case, we might seize multiple pictures within the onChange closure. What we did is to load every of the photograph gadgets 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 screen, we put the button within the navigation bar. Right here is the total code snippet:

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

For those who take pleasure in this text and wish to dive deeper into SwiftUI, you might take a look at our Mastering SwiftUI guide.