SwiftttCamera

Swifttty and easy camera framework for iOS.

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SwiftttCamera is a wrapper around AVFoundation that allows you to build your own powerful custom camera app without all the headaches of using AVFoundation directly.

Why use this?

Major headaches that `SwiftttCamera` automatically handles for you:

`AVFoundation` Headaches

Configuring and managing an AVCaptureSession.
Displaying the AVCaptureVideoPreviewLayer in a sane way relative to your camera’s view.
Configuring the state of the AVCaptureDevice and safely changing its properties as needed, such as setting the flash mode and switching between the front and back cameras.
Adjusting the camera’s focus and exposure in response to tap gestures.
Zooming the camera in response to pinch gestures.
Capturing a full-resolution photo from the AVCapturePhotoOutput.

Device Orientation Headaches

Changing the AVCaptureConnection‘s orientation appropriately when the device is rotated.
Detecting the actual orientation of the device when a photo is taken even if orientation lock is on by using the accelerometer, so that landscape photos are always rotated correctly.
(Optional) Returning a preview version of the image rotated to match the orientation of what was displayed by the camera preview, even if the user has orientation lock on.
(Optional) Asynchronously returning an orientation-normalized version of the captured image rotated so that the image orientation is always UIImage.Orientation.up, useful for reliably displaying images correctly on web services that might not respect EXIF image orientation tags.

Image Processing Headaches

(Optional) Cropping the captured image to the visible bounds of your camera’s view.
(Optional) Returning a scaled-down version of the captured image.
Processing high-resolution images quickly and efficiently without overloading the device’s memory or creating app-terminating memory leaks.

SwiftttCamera does many operations faster than UIImagePickerController‘s camera, such as switching between the front and back camera, and provides you the captured photos in the format you need, returning a cropped full-resolution image as quickly as UIImagePickerController returns the raw captured image on most devices. It allows all of the flexibility of AVFoundation without the need to reinvent the wheel, so you can focus on making a beautiful custom UI and doing awesome things with photos.

While both UIImagePickerController‘s camera and AVFoundation give you raw images that may not even be cropped the same as the live camera preview your users see, SwiftttCamera gives you a full-resolution image cropped to the same aspect ratio as your live preview’s viewport as well as a preview image scaled to the pixel dimensions of that viewport, whether you want a square camera, a camera sized to the full screen, or something else.

SwiftttCamera is also smart at handling image orientation, a notoriously tricky part of images from both AVFoundation and UIImagePickerController. The orientation of the camera is magically detected correctly even if the user is taking landscape photos with orientation lock turned on, because SwiftttCamera checks the accelerometer to determine the real device orientation.

Installation

SwiftttCamera is available through Swift Package Manager:

dependencies: [
    .package(name: "SwiftttCamera", url: "https://github.com/rogerluan/SwiftttCamera", .upToNextMajor(from: "1.0.0")),
]

Demo

To run the demo project, clone or download the repo, and open SwiftttCameraDemo/SwiftttCameraDemo.xcodeproj

SwiftttCamera Benchmark	UIImagePickerController Benchmark

Usage

Add an instance of SwiftttCamera as a child of your view controller. Adjust the size and layout of SwiftttCamera‘s view however you’d like, and SwiftttCamera will automatically adjust the camera’s preview window and crop captured images to match what is visible within its bounds.

import SwiftttCamera
import UIKit

class DemoViewController : UIViewController {
    private lazy var camera: SwiftttCamera = {
        let result = SwiftttCamera()
        result.delegate = self
        result.view.translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints = false
        return result
    }()

    override func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()
        swiftttAddChild(camera)
        camera.view.frame = view.frame // Alternatively, you can set it up using autolayout
    }
}

extension DemoViewController : CameraDelegate {
    func cameraController(_ cameraController: CameraProtocol, didFinishCapturingImage capturedImage: CapturedImage) {
        // Handle the captured image
    }
}

Switch between the front and back cameras:

let newCameraDevice: CameraDevice = camera.cameraDevice.toggling()
guard SwiftttCamera.isCameraDeviceAvailable(newCameraDevice) else { return }
camera.cameraDevice = newCameraDevice

Set the camera’s flash mode:

camera.cameraFlashMode = shouldEnable ? .on : .off

Set the camera’s torch mode:

let shouldEnable = enabled && camera.isTorchAvailableForCurrentDevice
camera.cameraTorchMode = shouldEnable ? .on : .off

Take a picture:

camera.takePicture()

Use SwiftttCamera‘s delegate methods to retrieve the captured image object after taking a photo:

func cameraController(_ cameraController: CameraProtocol, didFinishCapturingImage capturedImage: CapturedImage) {
    // Optional protocol function
}

func cameraController(_ cameraController: CameraProtocol, didFinishScalingCapturedImage capturedImage: CapturedImage) {
    // Optional protocol function
}

func cameraController(_ cameraController: CameraProtocol, didFinishNormalizingCapturedImage capturedImage: CapturedImage) {
    // Optional protocol function
}

References

This project is strongly based off of FastttCamera, but since that project hasn’t been maintained since 2016, this project aims to give life back to that awesome framework, with the same perks, but using more modern APIs, and limiting supported SDKs to iOS 13+ only. Huge thanks Laura Skelton, the creator of FastttCamera for creating such awesome project. Without her work, this project definitely wouldn’t be possible. 💪

Contributions

If you spot something wrong, missing, or if you’d like to propose improvements to this project, please open an Issue or a Pull Request with your ideas and I promise to get back to you within 24 hours! 😇

License

This project is open source and covered by a standard 2-clause BSD license. That means you can use (publicly, commercially and privately), modify and distribute this project’s content, as long as you mention Roger Oba as the original author of this code and reproduce the LICENSE text inside your app, repository, project or research paper.