24. Accessing the Photo Library

All current iOS devices come with at least one camera capable of taking photos and videos. In addition, all iOS devices can sync photos from iTunes on a computer to the Photos app and organize them in albums. Before iOS 4, the only method for developers to access user photos was UIImagePickerController. This approach has some drawbacks; namely, only one photo can be selected at a time, and the developer has no control over the appearance of the UI. With the addition of the AssetsLibrary classes in iOS 4, Apple provided much more robust access to the user’s photos, videos, albums, and events in an app. Although the AssetsLibrary classes were a big improvement over the UIImagePickerController, it was still difficult ...

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