I need to take some images from the iPhone / iPad photo library from within my app and store them in a Core Data entity, and display them as small thumbnail images (48×48 pixels) in a UITableViewCell, and about 80×80 pixels in a detail UIView. I’ve followed the Recipes sample app, where they use UIImageJPEGRepresentation(value, 0.1) to convert to NSData and store the bytes inside Core Data, and it doesn’t end up taking much space, which is good. But when retrieve the data, using UIImage *uiImage = [[UIImage alloc] initWithData:value]; and display it as a thumbnail image with “Aspect Fit”, it looks terrible and grainy. I tried changing the image quality variable in the JPEG compression, but even setting it to 0.9 doesn’t help.
Is that normal? Is there a better way to compress the image that doesn’t cause so much grainee-ness? Since I just want to show a small thumbnail, and then a slightly bigger thumbnail, I feel Core Data would be great for storing this, since it should (theoretically) also support iCloud. But if it’s going to look terrible, then I’ll have to reconsider.
Two things, are you resizing the image to the right size? Have you tried
UIImagePNGRepresentation()? That should compress it without losing quality.