Kingfisher

Kingfisher is a lightweight, pure-Swift library for downloading and caching images from the web. This project is heavily inspired by the popular SDWebImage. It provides you a chance to use a pure-Swift alternative in your next app.

Features

• Asynchronous image downloading and caching.
• URLSession-based networking. Basic image processors and filters supplied.
• Multiple-layer cache for both memory and disk.
• Cancelable downloading and processing tasks to improve performance.
• Independent components. Use the downloader or caching system separately as you need.
• Prefetching images and showing them from cache later when necessary.
• Extensions for UIImageView, NSImage and UIButton to directly set an image from a URL.
• Built-in transition animation when setting images.
• Extensible image processing and image format support.

The simplest use-case is setting an image to an image view with the UIImageView extension:

let url = URL(string: "url_of_your_image")
imageView.kf_setImage(with: url)

Kingfisher will download the image from url, send it to both the memory cache and the disk cache, and display it in imageView. When you use the same code later, the image will be retrieved from cache and shown immediately.

Requirements

• iOS 8.0+ / macOS 10.10+ / tvOS 9.0+ / watchOS 2.0+
• Swift 3 (Kingfisher 3.x), Swift 2.3 (Kingfisher 2.x)

Main development of Kingfisher will support Swift 3. Only critical bug fixes will be made for Kingfisher 2.x.

If you are upgrading to Kingfisher 3.x from an earlier version, please read the Kingfisher 3.0 Migration Guide for more information.

Next Steps

Read the Kingfisher wiki.

• Follow the Installation Guide to integrate Kingfisher into your project.
• Curious about what Kingfisher could do and how would it look like when used in your project? See our Cheat Sheet page for useful code snippets. If you are already familiar with Kingfisher, you may learn new tricks to improve the way you use Kingfisher!
• Lastly, please remember to read the full API Reference whenever you may need a more detailed reference.

Other

Future of Kingfisher

I want to keep Kingfisher lightweight. This framework will focus on providing a simple solution for downloading and caching images. This doesn’t mean the framework can’t be improved. Kingfisher is far from perfect, so necessary and useful updates will be made to make it better.

About the logo

The logo of Kingfisher is inspired by Tangram (七巧板), a dissection puzzle consisting of seven flat shapes from China. I believe she's a kingfisher bird instead of a swift, but someone insists that she is a pigeon. I guess I should give her a name. Hi, guys, do you have any suggestions?

Contact

Follow and contact me on Twitter or Sina Weibo. If you find an issue, just open a ticket. Pull requests are warmly welcome as well.

License

Kingfisher is released under the MIT license. See LICENSE for details.