Apple quietly introduced an API for playing animated GIFs and APNGs to the ImageIO framework in iOS 13. This project provides a high-level wrapper around that API that allows you to set animated images on UIImageViews.

Add the UIImageView+AnimatedGIF.h and UIImageView+AnimatedGIF.m source files to your project.

Animated images are represented using the TJAnimatedImage object, you can create a TJAnimatedImage using data or a file URL as input.

This library adds a category on UIImageView that gives it an animatedImage property, setting this to an instance of TJAnimatedImage will play the animated image, setting it to nil will stop playback.

UIImageView *imageView = /* an image view */;

// Play animated image from NSData
NSData *animatedImageData = /* animated image data */;
TJAnimatedImage *animatedImage1 = [TJAnimatedImage animatedImageWithData:animatedImageData];
imageView.animatedImage = animatedImage1;

// Play animated image from a file URL
NSURL *animatedImageFileURL = /* animated image file URL */;
TJAnimatedImage *animatedImage2 = [TJAnimatedImage animatedImageWithURL:animatedImageFileURL];
imageView.animatedImage = animatedImage2;

// Stop playback
imageView.animatedImage = nil;

You can also use the TJAnimatedImageView class to ensure image and animatedImage are mutually exclusive, explained in the next section.

One caveat with the UIImageView category provided here is that setting image externally will not stop playback. For example

imageView.animatedImage = /* an animated image */;
imageView.image = /* a still image */;
// Problem: imageView will continue displaying animatedImage.

One workaround for this is to manually nil out animatedImage before setting image.

imageView.animatedImage = /* an animated image */;
imageView.animatedImage = nil;
imageView.image = /* a still image */;
// imageView will correctly display the image.

Fortunately, this project provides a method to do this automatically. If you call +tj_configureStillImageAnimatedImageMutualExclusivity then UIImageView will guarantee that its image and animatedImage are mutually exclusive with no additional work on your part. Note that this method swizzles out UIImageView's implementation of -setImage: internally, which may not be desirable in your project.

A different way to work around this without tj_configureStillImageAnimatedImageMutualExclusivity is to use the TJAnimatedImageView subclass of UIImageView. TJAnimatedImageView enforces that setting image and animatedImage are mutually exclusive.

TJAnimatedImageView *animatedImageView = [TJAnimatedImageView new];
animatedImageView.animatedImage = /* an animated image */;
animatedImageView.image = /* a still image */;
// imageView will correctly display the image, animatedImage will be nilled out when image is set.

• On iOS versions prior to 13 using this library just sets still images on image views. There is no animated fallback behavior. If you're looking for a library that supports older iOS versions I suggest FLAnimatedImage.
• You must build with Xcode 11+ in order for this to build.