SDWebImage

    SDWebImage/SDWebImage

    Asynchronous image downloader with cache support as a UIImageView category

    ios
    cache
    carthage
    cocoapods
    gif
    heif
    image
    jpeg
    macos
    objective-c
    png
    sdwebimage
    swift
    visionos
    watchos
    webp
    Objective-C
    MIT
    25.7K stars
    6.0K forks
    25.7K watching
    Updated 3/7/2026
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    Contributors

    1

    Total contributors

    Open Issues

    113

    Generated Insights

    About SDWebImage

    Build Status Pod Version Pod Platform Pod License Carthage compatible SwiftPM compatible Mac Catalyst compatible codecov

    This library provides an async image downloader with cache support. For convenience, we added categories for UI elements like UIImageView, UIButton, MKAnnotationView.

    💡NOTE: SD is the prefix for Simple Design (which is the team name in Daily Motion company from the author Olivier Poitrey)

    Features

    For Apple visionOS

    From 5.19+, SDWebImage supports visionOS on all Package Managers (include CocoaPods/Carthage/SPM). Upgrade the related tools if you're facing issues.

    For 5.18+, SDWebImage can be compiled for visionOS platform. However, it's still in beta and may contains issues unlike the stable iOS UIKit support. Welcome to have a try and report issue.

    To build on visionOS, currently we only support the standard Xcode integration.

    See Installation with Swift Package Manager and Manual Installation Guide below.

    Supported Image Formats

    • Image formats supported by Apple system (JPEG, PNG, TIFF, BMP, ...), including GIF/APNG animated image
    • HEIC format from iOS 11/macOS 10.13, including animated HEIC from iOS 13/macOS 10.15 via SDWebImageHEICCoder. For lower firmware, use coder plugin SDWebImageHEIFCoder
    • WebP format from iOS 14/macOS 11.0 via SDWebImageAWebPCoder. For lower firmware, use coder plugin SDWebImageWebPCoder
    • JPEG-XL format from iOS 17/macOS 14.0 built-in. For lower firmware, use coder plugin SDWebImageJPEGXLCoder
    • Support extendable coder plugins for new image formats like BPG, AVIF. And vector format like PDF, SVG. See all the list in Image coder plugin List

    💡NOTE: For new user

    SDWebImage use Coder Plugin System to support both Apple's built-in and external image format. For static image we always use Apple's built-in as fallback, but not for animated image. Currently (updated to 5.19.x version) we only register traditional animated format like GIF/APNG by default, without the modern format like AWebP/HEICS/AVIF, even on the latest firmware.

    If you want these animated image format support, simply register by yourself with one-line code, see more in WebP Coder and HEIC Coder

    In future we will change this behavior by always registering all Apple's built-in animated image format, to make it easy for new user to integrate.

    Additional modules and Ecosystem

    In order to keep SDWebImage focused and limited to the core features, but also allow extensibility and custom behaviors, during the 5.0 refactoring we focused on modularizing the library. As such, we have moved/built new modules to SDWebImage org.

    SwiftUI

    SwiftUI is an innovative UI framework written in Swift to build user interfaces across all Apple platforms.

    We support SwiftUI by building a brand new framework called SDWebImageSwiftUI, which is built on top of SDWebImage core functions (caching, loading and animation).

    The new framework introduce two View structs WebImage and AnimatedImage for SwiftUI world, ImageIndicator modifier for any View, ImageManager observable object for data source. Supports iOS 13+/macOS 10.15+/tvOS 13+/watchOS 6+ and Swift 5.1. Have a nice try and provide feedback!

    Coders for additional image formats

    Custom Caches

    Custom Loaders

    • SDWebImagePhotosPlugin - plugin to support loading images from Photos (using Photos.framework)
    • SDWebImageLinkPlugin - plugin to support loading images from rich link url, as well as LPLinkView (using LinkPresentation.framework)

    Integration with 3rd party libraries

    • FirebaseUI - Firebase Storage binding for query images, based on SDWebImage loader system
    • react-native-fast-image - React Native fast image component, based on SDWebImage Animated Image solution
    • flutter_image_compress - Flutter compresses image plugin, based on SDWebImage WebP coder plugin

    Make our lives easier

    You can use those directly, or create similar components of your own, by using the customizable architecture of SDWebImage.

    Requirements

    • iOS 9.0 or later
    • tvOS 9.0 or later
    • watchOS 2.0 or later
    • macOS 10.11 or later (10.15 for Catalyst)
    • visionOS 1.0 or later
    • Xcode 15.0 or later

    Backwards compatibility

    Getting Started

    Who Uses It

    Communication

    • If you need help, use Stack Overflow. (Tag 'sdwebimage')
    • If you'd like to ask a general question, use Stack Overflow.
    • If you found a bug, open an issue.
    • If you have a feature request, open an issue.
    • If you need IRC channel, use Gitter.

    Contribution

    How To Use

    • Objective-C
    #import <SDWebImage/SDWebImage.h>
    ...
    [imageView sd_setImageWithURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://www.domain.com/path/to/image.jpg"]
                 placeholderImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"placeholder.png"]];
    
    • Swift
    import SDWebImage
    
    imageView.sd_setImage(with: URL(string: "http://www.domain.com/path/to/image.jpg"), placeholderImage: UIImage(named: "placeholder.png"))
    

    Animated Images (GIF) support

    In 5.0, we introduced a brand new mechanism for supporting animated images. This includes animated image loading, rendering, decoding, and also supports customizations (for advanced users).

    This animated image solution is available for iOS/tvOS/macOS. The SDAnimatedImage is subclass of UIImage/NSImage, and SDAnimatedImageView is subclass of UIImageView/NSImageView, to make them compatible with the common frameworks APIs.

    The SDAnimatedImageView supports the familiar image loading category methods, works like drop-in replacement for UIImageView/NSImageView.

    Don't have UIView (like WatchKit or CALayer)? you can still use SDAnimatedPlayer the player engine for advanced playback and rendering.

    See Animated Image for more detailed information.

    • Objective-C
    SDAnimatedImageView *imageView = [SDAnimatedImageView new];
    SDAnimatedImage *animatedImage = [SDAnimatedImage imageNamed:@"image.gif"];
    imageView.image = animatedImage;
    
    • Swift
    let imageView = SDAnimatedImageView()
    let animatedImage = SDAnimatedImage(named: "image.gif")
    imageView.image = animatedImage
    

    FLAnimatedImage integration has its own dedicated repo

    In order to clean up things and make our core project do less things, we decided that the FLAnimatedImage integration does not belong here. From 5.0, this will still be available, but under a dedicated repo SDWebImageFLPlugin.

    Installation

    There are 5 ways to use SDWebImage in your project:

    • using CocoaPods
    • using Carthage
    • using Swift Package Manager
    • download binary XCFramework
    • manual install (build frameworks or embed Xcode Project)

    Installation with CocoaPods

    CocoaPods is a dependency manager for Objective-C, which automates and simplifies the process of using 3rd-party libraries in your projects. See the Get Started section for more details.

    Podfile

    platform :ios, '8.0'
    pod 'SDWebImage', '~> 5.0'
    
    Swift and static framework

    Swift project previously had to use use_frameworks! to make all Pods into dynamic framework to let CocoaPods work.

    However, starting with CocoaPods 1.5.0+ (with Xcode 9+), which supports to build both Objective-C && Swift code into static framework. You can use modular headers to use SDWebImage as static framework, without the need of use_frameworks!:

    platform :ios, '8.0'
    # Uncomment the next line when you want all Pods as static framework
    # use_modular_headers!
    pod 'SDWebImage', :modular_headers => true
    

    See more on CocoaPods 1.5.0 — Swift Static Libraries

    If not, you still need to add use_frameworks! to use SDWebImage as dynamic framework:

    platform :ios, '8.0'
    use_frameworks!
    pod 'SDWebImage'
    

    Subspecs

    There are 2 subspecs available now: Core and MapKit (this means you can install only some of the SDWebImage modules. By default, you get just Core, so if you need MapKit, you need to specify it).

    Podfile example:

    pod 'SDWebImage/MapKit'
    

    Installation with Carthage

    Carthage is a lightweight dependency manager for Swift and Objective-C. It leverages CocoaTouch modules and is less invasive than CocoaPods.

    To install with carthage, follow the instruction on Carthage

    Carthage users can point to this repository and use whichever generated framework they'd like: SDWebImage, SDWebImageMapKit or both.

    Make the following entry in your Cartfile: github "SDWebImage/SDWebImage" Then run carthage update If this is your first time using Carthage in the project, you'll need to go through some additional steps as explained over at Carthage.

    💡NOTE: At this time, Carthage does not provide a way to build only specific repository subcomponents (or equivalent of CocoaPods's subspecs). All components and their dependencies will be built with the above command. However, you don't need to copy frameworks you aren't using into your project. For instance, if you aren't using SDWebImageMapKit, feel free to delete that framework from the Carthage Build directory after carthage update completes.

    💡NOTE: Apple requires SDWebImage contains signatures. So, by default the carthage build binary framework does not do codesign, this will cause validation error. You can sign yourself with the Apple Developer Program identity, or using the binary framework:

    binary "https://github.com/SDWebImage/SDWebImage/raw/master/SDWebImage.json"
    

    Installation with Swift Package Manager (Xcode 11+)

    Swift Package Manager (SwiftPM) is a tool for managing the distribution of Swift code as well as C-family dependency. From Xcode 11, SwiftPM got natively integrated with Xcode.

    SDWebImage support SwiftPM from version 5.1.0. To use SwiftPM, you should use Xcode 11 to open your project. Click File -> Swift Packages -> Add Package Dependency, enter SDWebImage repo's URL. Or you can login Xcode with your GitHub account and just type SDWebImage to search.

    After select the package, you can choose the dependency type (tagged version, branch or commit). Then Xcode will setup all the stuff for you.

    If you're a framework author and use SDWebImage as a dependency, update your Package.swift file:

    let package = Package(
        // 5.1.0 ..< 6.0.0
        dependencies: [
            .package(url: "https://github.com/SDWebImage/SDWebImage.git", from: "5.1.0")
        ],
        // ...
    )
    

    Download binary XCFramework

    From 5.19.2, SDWebImage provide the canonical official binary XCFramework on GitHub release pages.

    • Download XCFramework

    You can choose to download SDWebImage-dynamic.xcframework.zip for dynamic linked one, or SDWebImage-static.xcframework.zip for static-linked one.

    • Integrate to Xcode Project

    Drag the unzipped .xcframework into your Xcode Project's Framework tab.

    • Verify signature of binary XCFramework

    From Xcode 15 Apple will verify the signature of binary XCFramework, to avoid supply chain attack.

    The fingerprint currently should be FC 3B 10 13 86 34 4C 50 DB 70 2A 9A D1 01 6F B5 1A 3E CC 8B 9D A9 B7 AE 47 A0 48 D4 D0 63 39 83

    The certificate is stored in the repo here

    The public key is stored in the repo here

    See more: Verifying the origin of your XCFrameworks

    Manual Installation Guide

    • Check your command line Xcode version
    sudo xcode-select -s /path/to/Xcode.app
    

    or

    export DEVELOPER_DIR=/path/to/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer
    
    • Run the script to build frameworks
    ./Scripts/build-frameworks.sh
    
    • Run the script to merge XCFramework
    ./Scripts/create-xcframework.sh
    
    • Use your own certificate to sign XCFramework
    // https://developer.apple.com/support/third-party-SDK-requirements/
    codesign --timestamp -v --sign "your own certificate" SDWebImage.xcframework
    

    See more on wiki: Manual install Guide

    Import headers in your source files

    In the source files where you need to use the library, import the umbrella header file:

    #import <SDWebImage/SDWebImage.h>
    

    It's also recommend to use the module import syntax, available for CocoaPods(enable modular_headers)/Carthage/SwiftPM.

    @import SDWebImage;
    

    Build Project

    At this point your workspace should build without error. If you are having problem, post to the Issue and the community can help you solve it.

    Data Collection Practices

    From Xcode 15, we provide the new PrivacyInfo.xcprivacy file for privacy details, see Describing data use in privacy manifests

    You can exports the privacy report after archive your App by integrate SDWebImage via SwiftPM/XCFramework or CocoaPods (use_frameworks set to true).

    For old version or if you're using static ar archive, as required by the App privacy details on the App Store, here's SDWebImage's list of Data Collection Practices.

    Author

    Collaborators

    Credits

    Thank you to all the people who have already contributed to SDWebImage.

    Contributors

    Licenses

    All source code is licensed under the MIT License.

    Architecture

    To learn about SDWebImage's architecture design for contribution, read The Core of SDWebImage v5.6 Architecture. Thanks @looseyi for the post and translation.

    High Level Diagram

    Overall Class Diagram

    Top Level API Diagram

    Main Sequence Diagram

    More detailed diagrams

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