Question

How necessary is it to search for a path to an image using the NSBundle method pathForResource when creating a UIImage using imageNamed? I see tutorial codes that just specifies the name of the image directly, and then code that goes the extra mile to find the path first.

In my experience, I’ve always just used the name directly and it’s always worked fine. I assumed that it automatically knew how to find the image. How important or under what circumstances would it be necessary to do more than this?

Answer 1

The docs say that “the method looks for an image with the specified name in the application’s main bundle”, so I’d say you can always use just the name. The only exception might be images stored inside subfolders, especially when you have foo/image.png and bar/image.png. I don’t know whether [UIImage imageNamed:@"foo/image"] would work, but it’s trivial to try.

(What’s a bit confusing in these cases is that the groups in the Xcode tree do not correspond to folders in the resulting app bundle. Their contents are smashed together to the root of the bundle, unless you use a blue folder reference instead of a regular group.)