UICollectionView - Downloading images and effective reloading of data, like Instagram

Question

I noticed that apps like Intagram uses UICollectionViews to display the feed of photos. I also noticed that the cells for these photos is somehow placed on screen

Answer 1

The technique you want to implement is called lazy loading. Since you are using AFNetworking it will be easier to implement this in your case. Each of your collection view cell needs to have a UIImageView to display the image. Use the UIImageView+AFNetworking.h category and set the correct image URL by calling method

- (UICollectionViewCell *)collectionView:(UICollectionView *)collectionView cellForItemAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{
    // ....

    [cell.imageView setImageWithURL:imageURL placeholderImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"placeholder.png"]];

    // ...
    return cell;
}

Placeholder is the image which will be displayed until required image is downloaded. This will simply do the required job for you.

Note: By default, URL requests have a cache policy of NSURLCacheStorageAllowed and a timeout interval of 30 seconds, and are set not handle cookies. To configure URL requests differently, use setImageWithURLRequest:placeholderImage:success:failure:.

Also, for you reference, if you want to implement lazy loading of images yourself, follow this Apple sample code. This is for UITableView but same technique can be used for UICollectionView as well.

Hope that helps!