FirebaseUI for iOS — Storage

Using FirebaseUI to download and display images

Cloud Storage for Firebase provides secure file uploads and downloads for your Firebase apps, regardless of network quality. You can use it to store images, audio, video, or other user-generated content. Cloud Storage is a powerful, simple, and cost-effective object storage service.

FirebaseUI provides bindings to download an image file stored in Cloud Storage from a FIRStorageReference and display it using the popular SDWebImage library. This technique allows you to get all of SDWebImage's performance benefits while leveraging Cloud Storage's authenticated storage capabilities.

To load an image from a FIRStorageReference, simply use the UIImageView+FirebaseStorage extensions:

// Objective-C

// Reference to an image file in Cloud Storage
FIRStorageReference *reference = ...;

// UIImageView in your ViewController
UIImageView *imageView = ...;

// Load the image using SDWebImage
[imageView sd_setImageWithStorageReference:reference placeholderImage:placeholderImage];

// Swift

// Reference to an image file in Cloud Storage
let reference: StorageReference = ...;

// UIImageView in your ViewController
let imageView: UIImageView = ...;

// Load the image using SDWebImage
imageView.sd_setImageWithStorageReference(reference, placeholderImage: placeholderImage)

Images are cached by their path in Cloud Storage, so repeated loads will be fast and conserve bandwidth. For more information on caching in SDWebImage, see this guide.