Most memory efficient way to save a photo to disk on iPhone?

Question

From profiling with Instruments I have learned that the way I am saving images to disk is resulting in memory spikes to ~60MB. This results in the

Answer 1

Are your images actually 60MB compressed, each? If they are, there's not a lot you can do if you want to save them as a single JPEG file. You can try rendering them down to smaller images, or tile them and save them to separate files.

I don't expect your ImageIO code snippet to improve anything. If there were a two-line fix, then UIImageJPEGRepresentation would be using it internally.

But I'm betting that you don't get 60MB from a single image. I'm betting you get 60MB from multiple images saved in a loop. And if that's the case, then there is likely something you can do. Put an @autoreleasepool{} inside your loop. It is quite possible that you're accumulating autoreleased objects, and that's leading to the spike. Adding a pool inside your loop allows it to drain.