Get Image from URL Swift 3 Tutorial – Downloading Images in Swift

Hey guys, welcome to another post, which is Get Image From URL Swift 3. So basically we will learn how to get image from URL in Swift 3 or we can say downloading images in Swift 3.

Get Image From URL Swift 3 Tutorial Video

• You can also go through this video explanation.

Get Image From URL Swift 3 Tutorial

Creating a new Project

• We will create a SingleView application again.
• So I just created a project named ImageLoadingExample. (You can create a project with any name).

Adding UIImageView

• Now from the right search UIImageView. It is a view that we can use to display images.

• Drag it to your storyboard as you can see in the below image.

• Now open assistant editor and connect this view with your ViewController.swift file. If you don’t know how to do this check Xcode Button Tutorial.
• After connection your code will be like this.

//
//  ViewController.swift
//  ImageLoadingExample
//
//  Created by Belal Khan on 03/07/17.
//  Copyright © 2017 Belal Khan. All rights reserved.
//

import UIKit

class ViewController: UIViewController {

    @IBOutlet weak var uiImageView: UIImageView!
    
    override func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()        
    }
}

• Now we need an Image. So I will be using the following URL .

http://www.simplifiedtechy.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/simplified-techy-default.png

• If you will go to the above URL you will see the following image. You can use any URL but it must be a valid URL.

• So we have the Image URL, now lets download the image.

Fetching Image from URL

• Now to fetch the Image from the URL we will use the following code.

//
//  ViewController.swift
//  ImageLoadingExample
//
//  Created by Belal Khan on 03/07/17.
//  Copyright © 2017 Belal Khan. All rights reserved.
//

import UIKit

class ViewController: UIViewController {
    
    //URL containing the image
    let URL_IMAGE = URL(string: "http://www.simplifiedtechy.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/simplified-techy-default.png")
    
    @IBOutlet weak var uiImageView: UIImageView!
    
    override func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()
        
        let session = URLSession(configuration: .default)
    
        //creating a dataTask
        let getImageFromUrl = session.dataTask(with: URL_IMAGE!) { (data, response, error) in

            //if there is any error
            if let e = error {
                //displaying the message
                print("Error Occurred: \(e)")
                
            } else {
                //in case of now error, checking wheather the response is nil or not
                if (response as? HTTPURLResponse) != nil {

                    //checking if the response contains an image
                    if let imageData = data {
                        
                        //getting the image
                        let image = UIImage(data: imageData)
                        
                        //displaying the image
                        self.uiImageView.image = image
                        
                    } else {
                        print("Image file is currupted")
                    }
                } else {
                    print("No response from server")
                }
            }
        }
        
        //starting the download task
        getImageFromUrl.resume()
        
    }
}

Allowing HTTP Request

• The URL we are using here is http and be default ios only allows request on https urls. So we need to allow http URLs using info.plist file.
• So open the info.plist file as source code.

• Add the following xml code just before the last closing </dict> tag.

    <key>NSAppTransportSecurity</key>
	<dict>
		<key>NSAllowsArbitraryLoads</key>
		<true/>
	</dict>

• Now try running the application in simulator.

• As you can see it is working absolutely fine.

So thats it for this Get Image from URL Swift 3 Tutorial. Lets discuss in comments if you have any queries or feedbacks. And please SHARE this post if you found it useful. Thank You 🙂