How to Use PhotosPicker in SwiftUI

Previous to iOS 16, if you might want to show a photograph picker for customers to decide on images from Photograph library, you must 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 parts with UIViewControllerRepresentable. That stated, it could be nice if the SwiftUI framework comes with a local view for picture 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 assist system working iOS 16 or up, you should use this new view for dealing with picture alternatives.

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

Utilizing PhotosPicker in SwiftUI

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

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

It’s fairly simple to deliver up the images 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 a number of traces of code, Xcode ought to present you a button within the preview.

If you happen to click on the button, it shows a Images picker for selecting photographs from the picture library. Whenever you select a photograph, the picture picker mechanically dismisses and the chosen picture merchandise is saved within the selectedItem variable.

Filtering the Images

The matching parameter helps you to specify the picture filter to use to the picture library. Within the code above, we set its worth to .photographs to point out 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 picture library. What if you wish to exclude reside images from the picture set? You possibly can set the worth like this:

You utilize the .not filter to exclude Dwell Images.

Dealing with the Photograph Choice

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

First, we connect the onChange modifier to hearken to the replace of the selectedItem variable. Each time there’s a change, we name the loadTransferable methodology to load the asset knowledge.

Within the WWDC22 session (What’s new in the Photos 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. Because of this I used Knowledge.self as a substitute. 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 move 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 Images 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 picture on display screen.

Deciding on A number of Images

The PhotosPicker view may also assist a number of picture 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 Knowledge object. For the reason that consumer could choose multiple images, each variables grow to be an array:

To assist a number of picture choice, the trick is to make use of one other initialization methodology of PhotosPicker:

This methodology has a further parameter named maxSelection. We set the worth to 5, which suggests the consumer is allowed to assist 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 picture objects and add it to the information array (i.e. selectedPhotosData).

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

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

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