Displaying Collections of Images

Now that you’re familiar with some of the techniques for loading images, and you know where to go to find more, you may be wondering how you can display those images in a user interface.

Up to this point, we’ve seen many ways for displaying images in the UI when you know ahead of time which images you’re going to display, such as displaying icons from embedded bundle resources or Apple stock images.

What if you want to display a list of thumbnails of images that might be specified by the user at runtime? Fortunately, there’s an extremely handy control available to Mac OS X developers—the Image Kit Image Browser, also known by its class name as the IKImageBrowserView.

Using the image browser view requires us to create one or more classes that implement the browser view’s data source and delegate protocols. By now the concept of delegates and protocols should be somewhat familiar to you.