Serialization

Our serialization functionality empowers you to save the current operations that have been applied to the image and the image itself. It also allows you to recover such settings the next time the editor is opened again. The settings will be stored in a plain JSON file. For details on the JSON structure you can download our schema.

Saving the current settings#

When the editor is about to be closed, the according delegate method will be called. In that method, you can retrieve the serialized settings by calling the serializedSettings method on the PhotoEditViewController class and save these to a file. Here is some example code to get you started:

func photoEditViewController(_ photoEditViewController: PhotoEditViewController, didSave image: UIImage, and data: Data) {
  if let data = photoEditViewController.serializedSettings(withImageData: true) {
    do {
      try data.write(to: dataFileURL, options: '.atomic)
    } catch {
      print(error)
    }
  }

  dismiss(animated: true, completion: nil)
}

Restoring a settings file#

To set the initial editor settings, you can deserialize a Data object containing a previously serialized settings file using the Deserializer class. A settings file contains the serialized PhotoEditModel and the original input image as a UIImage object. After a successful deserialization, both of these are returned in a DeserializationResult object and may be used to fully restore the previous editing state. This can be done by using the deserialized image and model to initialize and present a new PhotoEditViewController instance:

let deserializationResult = Deserializer.deserialize(data: data, imageDimensions: nil)
if let model = deserializationResult.model, let photo = deserializationResult.photo {
  let photoEditViewController = PhotoEditViewController(photoAsset: photo, configuration: Configuration(), menuItems: PhotoEditMenuItem.defaultItems, photoEditModel: model)

  present(photoEditViewController, animated: true, completion: nil)
}

To apply existing settings to a different image, you need to pass the new images dimensions to the deserializer. This ensures that all dimensions and positions are matched as expected. Dimensions passed to Deserializer.deserialize(data:, imageDimensions:) always take precedence over the image dimensions contained in the serialized settings. Once you deserialized with the desired dimensions, you can once again present the PhotoEditViewController with the deserialized PhotoEditModel and the image:

if let inputImage = UIImage(named: "example_image"), let data = loadPredefinedSettingsData() {
  let photo = Photo(image: inputImage)
  let deserializationResult = Deserializer.deserialize(data: data, imageDimensions: inputImage.size)
  if let model = deserializationResult.model {
    let photoEditViewController = PhotoEditViewController(photoAsset: photo, configuration: Configuration(), menuItems: PhotoEditMenuItem.defaultItems, photoEditModel: model)

    present(photoEditViewController, animated: true, completion: nil)
  }
}