Question

My app is recording video and creating other documents and meta data – looks like all the Apple docs and other code refer to saving it in photos album or camera roll [are these two different?] using AssetsLibrary – would this not mix up all my app’s videos with the rest ?

I cannot find either Apple or any book that gives best practice to store custom media files separately in the file system and display using custom gallery – no good pointers even in Stackflow. Can some iOS guru point me to some good examples.

Note I am not asking about how to read/write video, etc. The question is how to organize a custom gallery using filesystem and a datastore and is it the right way to do it? If not, what other options? What are the pros/cons of AssetsLibrary?

Thanks.

Answer 1

You can store them in your documents directory. This is only accesible to your application. You can get a reference to that folder with this:

NSArray *paths = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES);
NSString *documentsDirectory = [paths objectAtIndex:0];

Apple recommends using NSFileManager to create, move, and delete files.

NSFileManager *fileManager = [NSFileManager defaultManager];

The NSFileManager class enables you to perform many generic file-system operations and insulates an app from the underlying file system.

NSFileManager documentation.

NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains