I\'m trying to do a simple thing; read an image from the internet, save it to the app\'s documents directory on the iphone, and read it back from that file so that i can do
Your code shows a severe lack of knowledge of how memory management works in Objective-C. In addition to the EXC_BAD_ACCESS errors you're receiving, improper memory management also causes memory leaks which, on a small device like the iPhone, can lead to random crashes.
I recommend you give this a thorogh read:
Introduction to Memory Management Programming Guide for Cocoa