how to upload gif images in swift for iOS

Question

I'm implementing an iOS app that uploads images to a web server. The app provides an extension that allows upload from apps like Twitter, Messages, etc.

When the image is selected by the user, it may be presented by the itemProvider either as an UIImage, Data, or URL. To deal with that, I create an UIImage object from what the itemProvider provides and send this new UIImage object to the upload function.

This latter (the upload function) uses Alamofire to upload the image and thus, requires to have a Data object, which I obtain by using UIImageJPEGRepresentation or UIImagePNGRepresentation of the UIImage object. That works for most images but in the case of gif, it does not. The .gif loses its animation property and only a static image is uploaded.

So my question is how to have a Data object from the UIImage object which preserves the .gif properties (animation) of the original file?

Thank you very much for the help you can provide.

Answer 1

Here is how to do it, pretty simple.

myData = Data(contentsOf: url)

But XCode requires to catch error which gives:

do{
   try myData = Data(contentsOf: url)
}catch let error{
   print ("Error \(error)")
}