This post is part of my collection: Swift 2 – For Beginners.

In this example we will see how to load photos in our application from the Photo Library and from the camera.

To open the photo library to pickup a photo we need a UIImagePickerController. Our controller can be the delegate. To do that we have to implement the protocols: UINavigationControllerDelegate and UIImagePickerControllerDelegate.

This code creates UIImagePickerController and use the method presentViewController to open the Photo Library:

  func selectImage(){
        let imagePickerController = UIImagePickerController()
        imagePickerController.delegate = self

        imagePickerController.sourceType = UIImagePickerControllerSourceType.PhotoLibrary
        imagePickerController.allowsEditing = true

        self.presentViewController(imagePickerController, animated: true, completion: nil)
    }

Once the user selects a photo our controller will be called back. Let’s implement a function that will load the selected image into a imageView:

   // Pick image finished, show selected image in a imageView
    func imagePickerController(picker: UIImagePickerController, didFinishPickingImage image: UIImage, editingInfo: [String : AnyObject]?) {
        // Show image
        imageView.image = image
        self.dismissViewControllerAnimated(true, completion: nil)
    }

To take a new photo using the camera we just change the value of imagePickerController.sourceType. Instead of PhotoLibrary we use Camera.

We can add a parameter to the previous function to specify the source of our image:

    func selectImage(from source: UIImagePickerControllerSourceType){
        let imagePickerController = UIImagePickerController()
        imagePickerController.delegate = self

        imagePickerController.sourceType = source
        imagePickerController.allowsEditing = true

        self.presentViewController(imagePickerController, animated: true, completion: nil)
    }

Complete example:

import UIKit

class ViewController: UIViewController,

    // 1 Allows navigation to camera or photo library to pick up a photo
    // used to set this controller as delegate of UIImagePickerController
    UINavigationControllerDelegate, UIImagePickerControllerDelegate
{

    override func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()
    }

    @IBOutlet weak var imageView: UIImageView!

    @IBAction func addFromCamera(sender: AnyObject) {
        selectImage(from: UIImagePickerControllerSourceType.Camera)
    }

    @IBAction func addFromLibrary(sender: AnyObject) {
        selectImage(from: UIImagePickerControllerSourceType.PhotoLibrary)
    }

    // 2 Show image picker or camera app
    func selectImage(from source: UIImagePickerControllerSourceType){
        let imagePickerController = UIImagePickerController()
        imagePickerController.delegate = self

        imagePickerController.sourceType = source
        imagePickerController.allowsEditing = true

        self.presentViewController(imagePickerController, animated: true, completion: nil)
    }

    // 3 Pick image finished, show selected image
    func imagePickerController(picker: UIImagePickerController, didFinishPickingImage image: UIImage, editingInfo: [String : AnyObject]?) {
        // Show image
        imageView.image = image
        self.dismissViewControllerAnimated(true, completion: nil)
    }
}