Download large amount of images with objective-C

Question

I'm currently developing an order entry application for my company. This means I need to download approximately 1900 product images to the iPad, and that's just the normal images. I also need to download an equal amount of thumbnails. The reason for downloading the images to the iPad instead of just displaying them from a given URL is that our reps wander into large stores which often don't have stable internet connections.

What would be the best course of action? The images are stored on our servers, but you need to be authenticated using Basic Auth before you can access those. I have thought of just downloading them one-by-one, which is tedious, or group them together on the server as a zip-file but that would be a large file.

Answer 1

A one-by-one is a valid options for the download. I have done projects with similar specs, so what I advise:

1. Use some 3rd party library to help you with the download of the images. MKNetworkKit for example. If you feel confortable enough, NSURLConnection is more than enough.
2. Store the images in the application sandbox .
3. Instead of downloading the thumbs, just create them on the go when you need them ( Lazy pattern ). Unless your image's thumbs are somewhat different than the original (some special effect).