The New York Times loves photos. We publish around 700 images every single day. These run the gamut from delectable dessert close-ups to evidence of the ravaging effects of climate change. We have an entire blog dedicated to photojournalism, and we currently work with over 3,600 photographers who have shot over 30,000 assignments in the past two years. Photos are an important part of our journalism and the stories we tell.
With our keen focus on photos and photojournalism, it may come as a surprise that the photo viewer in our iOS apps hasn’t changed significantly in years. In that time, some patterns have emerged that improve photo viewing on iOS, including flicking to dismiss and zooming image transitions. We set out to bring these patterns to our core iOS app in a reusable and extensible way by rewriting our photo viewer from the ground up. The New York Times has gotten serious about writing robust, minimally dependent, well-tested and fully documented components for all our apps, and this project reflects that philosophy.
Although we have a popular open source Objective-C style guide, The Times has never released an open source Objective-C project, and we wanted to take this opportunity to not only modernize our photo viewing experience, but also to write a new feature that could be shared and used in any app, both inside and outside the company. It took us a long time to open source something iOS-related, but it’s a start. And I hope that it’s the beginning of a greater focus from The Times on sharing and learning from the larger iOS community.
The photo viewer is available on GitHub, and we look forward to all of your issues, pull requests and feedback!