Is it possible to tile images in a UIScrollView without having to manually create all the tiles?

Question

In the iPhone sample code \"PhotoScroller\" from WWDC 2010, they show how to do a pretty good mimmic of the Photos app with scrolling, zooming, and paging of images. They al

Answer 1

Many image formats support region-based decoding. Instead of loading the whole image into memory, decompressing the whole thing, and discarding all but the region of interest (ROI), you can load and decode only the ROI, on-demand. For the most part, this eliminates the need to pre-generate and save image tiles. I've never worked with ImageMagick but I'd be amazed if it couldn't do it. (I have done it using the Java Advanced Imaging (JAI) API, which isn't going to help you on the iPhone...)

I've played with the PhotoScroller example and the way it works with pre-generated tiles is only to demonstrate the idea behind CATiledLayer, and make a working-self contained project. It's straightforward to replace the image tile loading strategy - just rewrite the TilingView tileForScale:row:col: method to return a UIImage tile from some other source, be it Quartz or ImageMagick or whatever.