UIImageView in custom UICollectionViewCell returning nil all the time

Question

OK in my story board I have made a UICollectionView with 3 cells. One of the cells I made a custom class for that obviously extends the UICollectionViewCell:

Answer 1

Well, this is odd. I know a solution, but I don't quite understand why it makes a difference. I had the same exact setup and the same problem. The IBOutlet was getting set to nil for the UIImageView, but not the UILabels.

Change your declaration for the UIImageView to be a strong property instead of an instance variable.

@property (strong) IBOutlet UIImageView* imageView;

This solved the issue for me. Clearly there is something with the way that UIImageView is connected / instantiated from the storyboard. As an added 'weird' factor, I use the same setup of ivars with a UITableViewCell and have no issue, only in the UICollectionViewCell