Question

I am implementing a UITableView with two images in a cell. Both images will be obtained via URL. I was wondering what is the best approach to load both these images asynchronously.

There were a couple of recommendations:
http://www.hollance.com/2011/03/mhlazytableimages-efficiently-load-images-for-large-tables/

and

http://www.markj.net/iphone-asynchronous-table-image/

However, I am not very sure which is the best approach for my requirements
1) Loading of around two hundred cells in a UITableView
2) Each cell contains two images to be obtained via URL

Answer 1

Those links should be useful. One good thing about UITableViews is that they do not create all of the cells at once. This means that if the images start loading only when applicable cells are created, it’ll roughly load the ones on the screen first, which is a desirable behavior. If you make sure that the images are only retained by the UIImageViews then you won’t risk having all images cached in memory in a low memory situation, as cells can be recreated. Depending on what kind of data you are loading, you may wish to cache the images – sized to their target dimensions – in the filesystem or database.